I saw this over the holidays and I consider it my best outing at a cinema in at least five years. I wasn't made to feel disgusted with the human race and I actually learned something. It is all the more surprising since Stephen Frears has made a specialty of portraying the working classes, if not the lower depths of humanity and his latest venture (Mrs. Henderson Presents) was a total and abject misfire.

I am a Canadian so Elizabeth (Elisabeth with an "s" in French) is my Queen, even though French Canadians are not reputed to love her. I appreciate that she actually speaks better French than most of our prime ministers. And I have always felt personally sorry for her during the death of Lady Di fracas, a humiliation she never deserved. This film demonstrates with fictitious means the opinion that she is not only a very special human being but also the best queen England has ever had. Helen Mirren's interpretation is utterly convincing and probably inspired by months of study of Elizabeth's footage in the 1992 BBC cinéma-vérité documentary Elizabeth R (not listed on the IMDb), which is still the definitive document on the Queen's real personality.



I found the whole experience simultaneously overwhelming and respectful, intricate in its details and nuances and somewhat poetic. The stag episode, especially, shows that she has subordinated her lifelong love of animals and much of her personal likes and dislikes to the dictates of tradition and the royal family's male obsession for the hunt. It also gives her a rare occasion to get in touch with her own feelings concerning mortality and Di's passing away.

Lady Di comes off as a floozy who played with fire by courting the medias (and was eventually destroyed by them) but was also a good mother, which is how it should be and the best way to remember her. Tony Blair comes off as a cynical but juvenile opportunist/upstart who still has a few hard political and life lessons to learn down the line. I won't even mention how his wife is portrayed; she is probably the only character in the film who would have reason to sue the filmmakers if not for the fact that it all probably happened exactly as depicted.

I don't know... I'd say this movie says almost the opposite. To me it seemed as if the Queen made a tragic mistake and Blair was made to look wiser than his years. I don't feel his portrayal was very cynical - he came in not liking the idea of monarchy so much, but the film shows him learning to respect its purpose.

-ringding-

The Queen's only "mistake" was staying true to her values and her family and royal obligations and putting them ahead of the kind of public relations fluffery Di and her fans so highly valued. Blair (in the film) has the power to make the Queen do what he wants her to, for better or worse. It is a sad truth that public opinion - for what it's worth - was against the Royals at the time and all for that poor martyred saintly Di. Blair learned to respect the Queen - in time - but stuck to his agenda of coming up on top of the situation and appear as a saviour of the nation in the court of public opinion, the only one that counted for him. Those who live for and by the medias die by the medias.

It's interesting to note that reactions to this film are all over the place. Except for Helen Mirren's interpretation, everyone's opinion is ultimately dependent of how you perceived the events themselves.

Those who worship Lady Di's memory and think the only legal queen in England is either Posh Spice or "Sir" Elton John have absolutely no clue about what goes on in this film. People who despise Blair think he is depicted as too heroic and courageous and those who admire him think he is made to look like a fool and a puppet. Go figure... The only one who comes out scot-free is the Queen herself. Even the anti-monarchists agree on that one.

That's funny, because I simply don't agree. I think the Queen comes off as out-of-touch and refusing to change, until the end when she says something about learning to be modern. She is not portrayed as weak nor stubborn, but principled, yet in the end she has to act against those same instincts for the better of her people. In this way she is truly a Queen: she finally acted as her people would have her act, not necessarily as she would have preferred. I realize that's a very democratic POV on the monarchy, but I think it's also a valid interpretation of it as well - one of the most reviled Queen's in history was renowned for being out-of-touch ("Let them eat cake!") and this movie shows her avoiding that fate.

I wouldn't say Blair is made to look like a hero or a fool; he lies in between and I think represents a fairly good example of the public's opinion at the time - I'm talking strictly in relation to the film here, not to real life, past or present - as a position of not particularly agreeing with the monarchy, but at the same time respecting its authority and legacy. He has the ability to control the Queen, but he does so because he's forced to do it on behalf of the people who had elected him to power. He wanted the authority to come from the Queen and hinted at it in his many communiques with the Queen, but ultimately it was the Queen who had to make the decision. She didn't have to do what Blair advised and she could have stuck to her values, but in the end she realized that the people wanted/needed these things to happen. It was a modern crowd she had to "lower" herself to...

Again, this is all that I get from the film, not from real life. I have no opinion on the real life events because I have not researched in depth nor directly experienced the events sufficiently... The only thing I remember is exactly where I was when I was told that Lady Di had died.
-ringding-

Well, it seems we DID see the same film after all. Except the film wouldn't have been done in the first place if Stephen Frears hadn't felt the need to show the Queen's point of view - for a change - and that Blair acted out of demagoguery to appease an hysterical mob of rabid Lady Di worshippers whose unhealthy appetite - fueled by Rupert Murdoch-owned medias - for every juicy tidbit about her life caused her death in the first place. And, by the way and for the last time, Marie-Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake". She was just reputed to have said it by the Rupert Murdochs of her time.

The film also makes a very valid point about the relative "classiness" of the Queen and Lady Di, the first a public head of state who renounces public pronouncements and even public favour when her grandchildren are orphaned in order to take better care of them - in private - and the other, a woman who goes on television to tell the world about her husband's and her own infidelities so that her children wouldn't learn about them "on the street". And all without ever showing the princes or Lady Di in anything other than public domain news footage. Good show!

I won't comment too much into the views of the royal family, etc. I honestly didn't follow it enough and I'm not British either.

More than any movie I've seen in the past few years, this is the one that has stayed with me the most. It's not the best movie I've seen, but it's very powerful and I come back to think of something about it that I liked at least once a week.

I highly recommend to anyone who has an inkling of interest in it: you won't be disappointed.

I can appreciate this as a superbly made film and I loved the two main performances (the scene with Mirren and Sheen over the loudspeaker was great). But other than that I didn't really take much enjoyment from the film.

EDIT: Watched it again to see if I would have a defferent experience, but alas, no.

Just to add more praise for the acting ..... I saw some fairly recent footage of the queen, and my immediate reaction was that she does a fantastic Helen Mirren imitation.

She won! She won! She won! (Best actress in a dramatic film, Golden Globes 2007)

"The Queen" is a look into how the royal family handled the death of Princess Diana in late August of 1997, which coincided with the arrival of then-new prime minister Tony Blair doing his best to coax some public relations gestures from the royal family (treated Diana's death as a private matter from the onset) in the wake of such a tragic event for fans of Diana worldwide in order to preserve/sustain public opinion the monarchy in a non-negative light.

Initially, I wasn't all that into Helen Mirren's performance as Queen Elizabeth in "The Queen" as my expectations were high from all the accolodes she's been receiving in awards season currently, but something just clicks in the 2nd act of the film where Mirren is not simply playing a part, but inhabits it with grace and uncertainty in a world where instaneous access to images and events from around the world can be had with a flip of a channel or a click of a mouse (plus an unrelenting press doesn't help matters), and traditions of old need more nuanced management of public perception than previously required. Needless to say, Mirren's performance is worth all the kudos she's been given of late. Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, is also up to the challenge, his Blair is able to see the larger perspective from the monarchy's view while also balancing the appropriate response from the government.

I give it 3.5 stars, or a grade of B+.

Just finish seeing it..... not sure what to think of the movie.... even though i think she will get the oscar for her performance, i think this movie is really overrated

LOVED this movie, one of the year's best.

I hated it. It's a TV docudrama that somehow made it to the big screen. The kind of film that pretends it's exploring some interesting point (an actual docudrama I saw recently - just as bad - focused on the idea of Tony Blair leaving office and trying to sustain himself in a world where everyone hates him) but in fact, the filmmakers don't care about what they're doing.

Helen Mirren is just Judi Dench Lite, no idea why she won the Oscar and countless other awards. Michael Sheen was, however, characteristically good. Probably the only good element to the film.

This film enrages me so much. I can't stand this kind of filmmaking. There's never any passion in a docudrama such as this. If you could tell that its creators genuinely cared about being able to express a feeling or explore a view on an event such as that which is the basis of the film, then that's good, even if it's a bad film overall. But in this type of film there never is. The filmmakers want to do something a bit controversial and daring because they think it makes them seem important and influential, and they only ever end up looking like a bunch of hopeless tossers.

I think the lack passion was completely the point. People were passionate about Diana, the Queen does not want to appear passionate.

I'm not going to assume that you were looking for Bruckheimer explosions as your drama, but what else was needed? Just because a story could be told on TV doesn't make that a bad film.

By 'lack of passion', I meant, on the part of the filmmakers, not of the characters. I didn't get any impression that the filmmakers were excited to be making the film or anything like that, which is awful. If you're approaching a film like this (that is, one which explores a very controversial subject) without having any real belief behind what you're doing or the way you're doing it, it shows. Look at the other end of the spectrum, Michael Moore. People might argue that he fudges statistics and whatever else, but fundamentally he believes absolutely in what he's doing. And that is usually termed a Good Thing.

The film needed to convince me that it wasn't made for the sake of it, and the fact is that it did. I needed to be able to see that the people making the film wanted to do so to make a point, to explore the idea because it's interesting, not just because nobody has before and it's controversial.

Quite apart from all of that, I also found the dialogue unrealistic, tedious and predictable and the acting largely mediocre. If you ignore my issues with what I perceive as problems with the credibility of the film, I didn't think it was a particularly good film anyway.

And frankly, I think that the difference between TV specials and films is huge, and if you present many TV programs as films, you've made a terrible mistake. The Queen should have been shown on TV and stayed there. It would have been far more suitable.

Whatever you perceive this film's shortcomings to be, it's still the best film drama of at least the past five years, in my humble opinion. Now, what does that tell you about today's filmmaking? I left the theatre thinking: Thank you, God! I can't believe I just saw a film that didn't treat me like a retard and made its point in a very subtle way by simply making me feel part of the lives of the people depicted. And none of its great moments (I'll leave you to judge what they were) would have succeeded as well on television. And it's not a docudrama, it's fiction based on real characters. We have no way of knowing if things really happened that way. The director and writer choose to believe and want us to believe it could have.

^ Docudrama was the best way I could think of to describe it concisely. I mean, the one shown over here about Tony Blair's fictional future is obviously not fully based on fact, but I think the fly-on-the-wall style combined with some basis on and reference to real people and events qualifies it. But, if you like, I suppose it's a docufiction.

I've just had a thought: The reason this film works so well with most people is that, being based on the personality of the real Queen - whom Helen Mirren mimics so well, it makes it easy for the viewer to bring along at least his superficial impressions of the woman in question, thus saving the screenwriter the trouble of establishing and developing original characters, which used to be the hallmark of fine cinema and theatre, but is nowadays so rare I don't think the average dumbed-down viewer would even stand for it.

After all, we live in a society where most successful films are based on comicbooks, where Andrew Lloyd Webber is the most successful theatrical entrepreneur in the world and the public is so lazy, no one will even consider going to see a film or a musical whose storyline is not already well known and based on something else, in case they might - God forbid - have to think for themselves...

In other words, The Queen is the best of a bad lot and reminds us of a better time when characters were created out of whole cloth, were developed on the screen and became believable.

Or as they say in Idiocracy: http://www.jahozafat.com/php/sounds/...rewasatime.mp3