This is not going to be a review of the King’s Speech. It has been out for a while and I just did not care about enough when I saw it to review it. And that really is the problem that I see with it winning the Oscar for Best Movie.
I cannot say that I particularly care about the Oscars, and more eloquent people than I have spoken before about why the Oscars really mean very little (http://www.cracked.com/article_18460_5-reasons-oscars-matter-even-less-than-you-thought.html) but it still bothers me. Why pick the King’s Speech?
From a technical standpoint the movie was fine, the acting was fine, I assume they portrayed the period realistically; it was a serious, emotional movie but it had touches of humor here and there which is important in keeping these slow, period pieces balanced and not feel like they are dragging on. Still, I just could not get myself to care about anything that was happening on screen.
To give a good comparison, I have watched a lot of anime, and anime arguably ran out of credible stories a decade ago (they didn’t but follow me here) which is why they keep on coming out with the most ridiculous ideas like having action style (shounen) shows that follow board games like Go or Mahjong. To pull this off the show has to really invest the audience in the characters. It really does not matter if you are interested in the board game, the show can still work as long as you the characters and their trials draw you in.
The King’s Speech did none of this for me. I understand it was not an action movie of the anime type, but on some level it had the same basic idea going for it: I have to watch a person fight through a speech impediment, a mental task in order to succeed at something. The only way to get me to really care about the movie was to get me to care about the main character, and I really did not. There was very little personality in the movie. He is a prince, who became a king, and his father preferred his brother over him. So what? I mean by itself, one could argue, that alone is character development enough and it is a matter of correct execution (which the movie then fails at), but I think the film actually executes it splendidly. The problem is that it is not enough; it is too thin.
I do not believe that a well crafted character should have only one defining trait, and maybe through my poor memory I actually just cannot remember this, but do we know what King George VI’s favorite song is? Favorite color, or book, or soup? Perhaps there is one point in the movie where they elaborate on that, but for the life of me I cannot remember it. I think that is a serious problem with the film. I did not at any point feel like I knew any of these characters, except for maybe the speech therapist a little bit. They all acted as they should have, but the movie is just so thin that it does not matter.
What this amounts to is that I could not particularly care about the movie by the time the credits rolled, and I just felt sort of unsatisfied. I felt like I had watched a 2 hour version of a 3 minute trailer, since the trailer went over everything in the movie (speech impediment, quirky speech therapist, triumphant moment) and there was nothing else to color in the edges of these black and white characters.
As a final note, while I was thinking about just how unsatisfied this left me feeling, I was trying to compare this with another movie that I felt moved very slowly but that I thoroughly enjoyed: Meet Joe Black. In both movies, there are an ample amount of quiet scenes, scenes of little talking (or at least this is how the King’s Speech felt to me because no one said anything of substance), and yet I feel so much character from the blank personality of Death in Meet Joe Black if only because of one scene: the peanut butter scene. In this brilliant segment that is for haters of the movie probably an excruciating 5 minutes, Death learns that he enjoys the taste of peanut butter. In different parts of the movie later on he can be seen eating peanut butter or mentioning it casually, and it is not important to the plot in any way or significant in any of these other scenes. All it serves to do is bring us closer to the character of Death and help us to get to know him. There was none of this in the King’s Speech, which is why a few years from now I will have utterly forgotten the movie. I am so unsatisfied with the King’s Speech winning because an award for the Best anything of a year should not go to something that will be forgotten quickly. As much as I hate Avatar, and I hate it so, if it had come out this year I would have preferred Avatar to have won because at least that movie I know I will be unable to forget ever because it is goddamn everywhere. Until the Oscars, I had pretty much forgotten the King’s Speech as I left the theater.
