A new prime minister who feels sympathy for his monarch's fustiness, and saves her from the consequences of her reserve; a royal family happy to be rid of an unseemly daughter-in-law; a prince hoping that his mother will realise the cost of withheld affection; a speech-writer angling to give his boss leverage over the guardians of conservatism and privilege. A queen who feels more sympathetic regard for a hunted stag than for her hunted former daughter-in-law, and is shocked to her core by the discovery that her subjects' love has turned to suspicion and scorn. "The Queen" imagines the interplay of feeling among the residents of Buckingham Palace, Balmoral Castle, and 10 Downing Street, during that late summer week in 1997 when a car crash in Paris punctuated the grim second act of the royal story that began as a fairytale engagement and marriage in 1981. We see a literal application of correct funerary protocol driving a huge, and unexpected, wedge between the English royal family and its subjects. We see a Prime Minister, flushed by the success of his new vision for Britain, and bolstered by his iconoclastic wife, regarding his Queen at first as a relic of the past he's received a mandate to revitalize, then working to save her from the consequences of her seeming coldness, and finally coming to admire her powers of discernment and endurance. We see the loneliness within a family taught for generations to perform the role of calm, dispassionate leadership by example, but never allowed (and never allowing itself) to reveal true inner feeling. One thing made clear to me by the film: Diana's gift of apparent naturalness and emotional honesty, which endeared her to millions of people, were perceived as unworthy of her station, by many others. The public response to her death was regarded by many upper-class Britons as confirmation of the public's emotional instability and a predictably tacky empathy for her own excess of sentimentalism. These feelings were manifest in the royal family's behaviour at the time. What they did not realise was the depth of loving admiration which Diana had kindled in peoples' hearts during her marriage, and the depth of sorrowful loss which her death created. So their adherence to strict protocol - the death of a former family member was to be grieved privately and without show - caused their subjects to judge them as cold and cruel. The Prime Minister knew that the moment was altogether more significant, and pivotal. He counselled an acknowledgement of the immense public grief, and his counsel saved the queen's stature. It's altogether admirable that the excellence of the film's performances, especially those of Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen, take us back inside this time, not so long ago, in which a young woman's death transfixed the western world, and an ancient and respected institution was, for a time, distrusted and almost despised by the very public on whom it depended for its authority.
