During a screening of the luminous new Turkish film called “Honey” (Bal) whose main character is a young boy with a stuttering problem, I said to myself: Unrepentant Marxist, why don’t you review “The King’s Speech” while you are at it. So, here goes. I doubt that two films could be more unalike, but the inclusion of central characters who stutter screams out for a comparative study approach. Frankly, as I start this review I have no idea how I can connect the two films apart from the speech defect angle, but maybe I’ll have something figured out by the end!
It is not too hard to figure out why “The King’s Speech” won the Oscar for best movie of the year. It is a highly entertaining historical drama with first-rate performances by the two lead actors: Colin Firth as King George VI (nicknamed Bertie after his first name Albert, the name Albert was eventually downplayed for sounding too Germanic) and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist Lionel Logue. The film is cut from the Merchant-Ivory cloth and features remarkably evocative costume design and scenery that makes you feel as if you have been transported to late 1930s Britain.
The screenplay is by David Seidler, a journeyman whose previous work consisted mainly of banal TV shows and movies like “Come On, Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story.” As someone who suffered from a stammering problem as a child, Seidler found himself drawn to the King George VI story. Born in 1937, Seidler grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in London and developed his speech problem on his way to the United States, where his family was relocating. He was on a three ship convoy that lost one to a U-Boat torpedo.
After learning about King George VI’s problem, he began the research for a screenplay in the 1970s. Seidler, now in remission from throat cancer, told the National Post that “being a stutterer puts a cloud over childhood.”
It can also put a cloud over the most powerful man in Britain as well. The central drama of “The King’s Speech”, as I am sure you are aware, is driven by the clash between the public’s need for a grandiloquent leader to rouse them to action and his inability to say more than a word or two without freezing up. In one of the more compelling scenes, we see Bertie watching a newsreel of Adolph Hitler in all his perverse glory making a speech at Nuremberg. After taking him for a minute or two, Bertie tells his minions that he wishes he could speak like that.
I had misgivings about the theme of the movie since I am no fan of the royalty but eventually was won over by the story and the acting. Lionel Logue, the speech therapist, is also an amateur Shakespearean actor who recites lines to his children and auditions for a production of Richard III at one point (he is deemed too old and not regal enough, a reference no doubt to his Australian origins.) It dawned on me at that point that despite the fact that most of Shakespeare’s plays are designed to flatter the British monarchy, they are part of our cultural heritage. While Seidler’s screenplay cannot be elevated to such a sphere, it does remind us that good art, even if it is popular art, can work on its own terms without being judged politically.
Indeed, I saw “The King’s Speech” much less in terms of a kind of modern-day reworking of a Shakespeare play about royalty than as an inversion of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”. Shaw’s tale involves an upper-class twit teaching a commoner how to speak properly, while Seidler reverses the roles. Logue not only teaches the British monarch to properly manage his stutter (it cannot be cured) but to relate to common people in a more humane manner, starting with himself. In the opening scene, Logue insists on the two men calling each other by their first names, Lionel and Bertie, even though the future King finds this almost intolerable. While Seidler probably did not consider this when writing his screenplay, one can easily make the connection with another class inversion, namely P.G. Wodehouse’s tales of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, the British aristocrat who must be taught about life by his manservant.
While “The King’s Speech” succeeds as a kind of old-fashioned, four-square, conventional film, “Honey” succeeds on its own terms, namely as an art movie that defies audience expectations of both character and plot.
The central character in “Honey” is a six-year-old boy named Yusuf (Bora Altaş, a non-professional) who lives with his father Yakup (Erdal Besikçioglu) and mother Zehra (Tülin Özen) in a remote mountainous village where life appears not much different than it was a hundred years ago in Turkey, especially how Yakup makes his living. He is a beekeeper who scales tall trees in pursuit of the high-quality honey found in the area.
Unfortunately, the disappearance of bees drives him further and further up the mountains where he installs new hives at the top of trees in hope of attracting the creatures that sustain him and his family. The film opens with him scaling a tall tree, navigating to the middle of a branch to which he will attach a new hive. Just as he has begun his work, the branch breaks and leaves him suspended precariously far above the ground.
In a series of flashbacks, we see how the family relates to each other and its environment. While the mother and father are key characters, it is really Yusuf’s story. Early on, his father asks him to read from the Koran, which he does with great ease and fluidity. A day or so later, we see him in a classroom where the teacher asks the children to take turns reading from a primer. When a girl begins reading a page or two from the story The Lion and the Mouse, we see Yusuf mouthing the words silently one step ahead of her. Clearly, he knows how to read. But when it is his turn to read, he has the same paralysis as Bertie, the future king, and cannot utter more than a word or two without looking up at the teacher in total consternation. At this point, all the other students begin laughing at him.
“Honey” dispenses with plot almost entirely. Except for wondering about the fate of the father, we rely mostly on the quotidian existence of a very traditional family to sustain our interest. There is very little dialog in the film apart from the father speaking to his son about his expectations from him. Unlike few films I have seen in this or any other year, “Honey” conveys a father’s love for his son in a more convincing and moving fashion than one would be led to expect. With so many Hollywood films (Little Miss Sunshine, for example) drenched in family unhappiness and loathing, it is a breath of fresh air to be reminded that solidarity within a family unit is possible.
Most of “Honey” follows Yusuf on his daily rounds: picking eggs out of a coop for his mother to make cookies for dad; ambling off to school on a muddy road; following his father as he tends to the hives, etc. All in all, director Semih Kaplanoglu seems to have absorbed the aesthetic of the new Iranian film that seeks to depict the lives of ordinary people in a compassionate and naturalistic manner.
In an interview with The People’s Voice, Kaplanoglu presented his views on a number of topics:
Q: What’s your view on the interlaced correlation of modern cinema with violence, aggression and depravity? Are these scenes which we expose to a wide range of large-scale audiences including women, children and the youth enough healthy and proper for them?
A: It is where the human centered civilization takes and leaves us. What we see is falling away from the spirituality and ego being more favored. The art, however, is becoming more egocentric in all its forms. Another drawback is the idea of craftsmanship is extinguishing within the art. Tradition and certain code of conduct vanish too as a result. We are leading lives in such a carnal civilization that it proves to be impossible to feel and perceive what is in front of our bare eyes. On the other hand, imagery is so filthy that it’s no longer able to show. There is a huge mechanism designed to hide the truth or at least tune it down. Truth is perceived as a new contrived world because it is kept away from us. We got accustomed to death and violence. Nothing moves us anymore. There is a tiny single button to switch from child casualties and a silly competition. If truth doesn’t touch your conscience and refused by you then what can a film do? Cinema and other forms of art are helpless in the face of our pathetic and miserable situation. If the images of dead Palestinian, Iraqi, Lebanese and Afghan kids or refugees or African poor don’t have an impact on us and we go on our lives undisturbed, then which artist or filmmaker can touch our hearts? We should be more alert and conscious in this world. We should keep remembering these two; Unity of the Creator and his consent. I am trying to make my films based or these principles.
Q: What’s in your view, the ultimate goal of art in general, and what is precisely sought in our approaches toward art? Do we search for an ephemeral and mere enjoyment by watching a 1 hour movie, or is there something beyond that?
A: When the time of artwork diverges from our own time it also causes one to get detached from the time he lives in. One wastes his life with showbiz, an industry of gossip and distraction yet he doesn’t want to die. He is bloody scared of death. He doesn’t want to say or hear anything of his death. On the other hand he wishes to see the death of others. It means the lapse of time and the perception of time will disappears. “I watched a film and didn’t realize how the time passed” people say. On the contrary you should notice how the time has passed. The Aristotelian understanding of art aims at purgation of emotions. Film bridges the gap between ego and the soul. Self identifies with it. It is useless art, useless knowledge otherwise. I know the masses relate to what is associated with ego because such films don’t challenge the audience and don’t expect them to contribute. But we don’t have to succumb to that rule. We are also responsible to find a way to reach out to the masses. There are two sides to a coin.
“Honey” is scheduled to open in New York on Friday, March 25 at the Village East Cinema. Highly recommended.
The filmmaker obviously considers “showbiz” to embrace the kinds of movies that are pure distraction. We want to be distracted by our own fear of death. A movie like “Battle: Los Angeles” introduces us to scores of violent deaths but we see those as a form of computer game, not to be taken seriously. A single death in “Bal” would have the effect of causing us to face our own morality. Hence the greater audience for the blockbuster.
Comment by Harvey — March 11, 2011 @ 10:17 pm
I went to see “The King’s Speech” with same trepidation. It also won me over, in part because the monarchy was not lionized, in the film, however much its grandeur and imposed dignity was preserved.
Also, it was superbly acted, even if by Cameronites like HBC…
Comment by Jack Crow — March 11, 2011 @ 10:55 pm
I liked The King’s Speech too, but I don’t know about the idea of Shakespeare’s plays pleasing royalty- look at Macbeth or Titus andronicus even
Comment by Jenny — March 12, 2011 @ 12:07 am
I give a fuck only about a disgustingly rich actor playing royalty who personally has the political instincts of a political hack on the Fox Noise Channel. I’d give this motherfucker shit and push him in it.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — March 12, 2011 @ 3:46 am
Marvellous discourse by Semih Kaplanoglu there. This is not the kind of perspective that’s easily available in the hyper-individualist and materialist West. You’ve meade me want to see the film…
Comment by david montoute — March 12, 2011 @ 4:22 am
I enjoyed both these reviews. Thanks for bringing Honey to attention.
No doubt that The King’s Speech is well-acted, and you touch on many of the elements that have so pleased friends and family. However, the film falsifies the Nazi sympathies of both Edward and “Bertie”, as well as those of Churchill and I can’t help but see it as timely repackaging of the Windsors. While I disagree with C Hitchins on practically everything these days, I’m glad he wrote this.
http://www.slate.com/id/2282194/
The UK Guardian published it first, of course. Though The Guardian reviewers liked TKS, they had to at least mention that it rather glossed over reality, and that some might have objections to that. Little thing like living memory, don’t you know?
Comment by Kay — March 12, 2011 @ 6:02 am
King’s Speech a hit and myth in the way it treats Brits
by Guy Rundle
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/02/18/rundle-the-kings-speech-a-hit-and-myth-in-the-way-it-treats-brits/
By now it shouldn’t feel surprising to be surprised at finding yourself in agreement with Christopher Hitchens. Currently, following revelations by “curve ball” that the entire “Iraq WMD intelligence” was made up over a kitchen table, the Hitch must be hunkered down somewhere, planning his next move.
But before that latest disaster, he had time to fire off a piece on the film du moment, The King’s Speech, in which Australian speech coach — ha ha ha — Lionel Logue, cures King George VI’s stammer, thus making it possible for George to inspire the nation in time of war.
Hitchens focuses on the most egregious and obvious falsehood in the film — that Winston Churchill (played as caricature by Timothy Spall) — was a firm supporter of George — or Prince Bertie as he then was, at the time that King Edward VIII was trying to hold on to the crown, and marriage to Wallis Simpson, a divorcee.
One is accustomed to historical fudging, but even so this is a bit of an eye-popper. Though Churchill was at the time trying to pull together a popular front against the Nazis, he became an obsessive supporter of Edward VIII, a clear Nazi sympathiser and supporter. His support for Edward was an expression of his quixotic, romantic nature.
The film — now starting to haul in the awards — didn’t have time to explain such complexity — it didn’t have time for complexity at all. So why not leave Churchill out? Because it needs him. Its slickness and undoubted quality is devoted to a propagandistic presentation of World War II, in a way that resonates with the dominant neoconservative myth of the war — that it was a clearly understood moral challenge that can serve as a template for any current conflict. Furthermore, Britain was rallied by the royal family and the establishment to resist Nazism, even at the cost of its own survival.
None of this bears the slightest historical examination. George VI was no Nazi sympathiser, but, like much of establishment — and most of the British population — he was a supporter of Chamberlain’s attempt to broker a deal with Hitler in 1938. The deal is retrospectively constructed as folly and cowardice now, which ignores the fact that almost everyone wanted to avoid war, living as they were under the shadow of the previous one.
Nor did George VI change his views, even, or especially, in the darkest days of 1940 — the royal family didn’t want Chamberlain sacked, and it wanted Lord Halifax to become Prime Minister and strike a deal with Hitler, that would let him turn his tanks eastward.
That Churchill became Prime Minister and turned the war into a total offensive against Nazism had nothing to do with the royal family — it was forced on the establishment by the Labour Party who would not accept anyone else as a war-time coalition leader.
The Labour Party doesn’t make much of an appearance in The King’s Speech, but neither do the British people as a whole — whose opinion of the war they were drifting into was far more complex and conflicted than the film describes.
Many didn’t want it all. Many writers of the time, Orwell most famously, remarked on how little awareness there was of the stated reasons for war among the average population, and how little the theme of bestial Nazism, etc, played among the British people.
Some saw it as an inexplicable war — many agreed with Germany’s anti-Semitism, in theme, if not in method, and wondered why they should be fighting to defend Poland, and other places. The conservative government had already denied Jewish refugees entry to England — and in 1939 George VI wrote to Lord Halifax asking him to communicate to Germany that it was Britain’s wish that Jews not be allowed to leave their “country of origin”.
Support for the war was of two types: after Dunkirk it was simply and obviously a war for national survival. Those who supported it in those terms were neither particularly pro- or anti- the royal family; to the day-to-day thinking about the awful conduct of total war, they were fairly irrelevant.
My English grandmother could serve as an example. She signed on for an arms factory in 1940, pulling 12-hour shifts six days a week. Like many people at the time, she thought about what she’d do if invasion came — and concluded that she could probably take out two German soldiers with a kitchen knife.
She was a straight-down-the-line Tory and royalist. But her will to fight didn’t come from that, or from a speech or two from Buckingham Palace. It came from a deep atavistic desire to defend kith and kin. It was, it is, a sense of right that cannot be assimilated to a larger framework.
She, and millions like her, deserve a better memorial than The King’s Speech, which makes them no more than extras in their own history. There’s no surprise that the director, Tom Hooper, is from a left-liberal elite family, all of whom live within cooee of each other in Primrose Hill, London.
Hitchens and his ilk can ping the obvious political falsifications of The King’s Speech — but they’re unwilling to go deeper and challenge its base assumptions, that WWII remains a crusade for good to which everyone was committed, rather than a confused and multiple event. For to do so would be to knock away the supreme myth of the West, and the myth that the pro-war party relied upon for the invasion of Iraq.
The King’s Speech needs World War Two — to give it heft. Otherwise, it’s just the story of an ennobled dork who learnt not to stutter. Its truly noxious argument is that Britain only found its voice against Nazism when George VI did.
But the reverse is the case. The British establishment was so compromised by the process that they could not speak for the nation. Famously, after the invasion of Poland, when Labour deputy-leader Arthur Greenwood rose to speak, dissident Tory MP Leo Amery yelled from the benches “speak for England”, effectively acknowledging that the ruling class were utterly out of step with the British people.
That is the undistorted speech that lies beneath the film’s myth — that the ruling class had to be forced into action against Nazism by fear of their own people, and what would happen if the elite continued to compromise with European fascism, as they had in the Spanish Civil War. The film’s producers had a story that combined personal triumph against odds (good) with royalty (even better). But in making it a symbol of national resistance, they falsified the record in a way that libels and misrepresents the struggle and sacrifices of millions.
Comment by Shane H — March 12, 2011 @ 11:22 pm
I can’t say I disagree with a word that Shane wrote, but I was satisfied to see some decent acting on the screen. It has been a dreadful year.
Comment by louisproyect — March 12, 2011 @ 11:25 pm
@Jenny: Macbeth is very much about pleasing royalty, James I in particular. His presumed ancestor Banquo, who was Macbeth’s accomplice in Shakespeare’s source material, was made into a heroic character. James’s obsession with witchcraft was also well-known and likely influenced Shakespeare’s choice of topic. In a more general sense, the play seems to believe in the divine right of kings, as Duncan’s murder is marked by inversions in the natural order.
Comment by vms — March 14, 2011 @ 5:52 pm