"The Queen"

Sept. 29, 2006 | To look at Queen Elizabeth now, a symbol of privilege and unyielding propriety, with those tightly managed gray curls, that heavily practiced smile, those enormous straight-from-the-Wolery specs, you wouldn't know that as a girl queen -- she ascended the throne in 1952, at age 25 -- she wasn't half bad-looking. As part of a bit he once did about the death of Princess Diana, the comedian Eddie Izzard took a detour to make some observations about the young Elizabeth II of the '50s, admitting that he found her kind of sexy -- "Hard to believe," he noted, in the way you do when you're attracted to someone in spite of your better judgment. He said that she ought to have spent her youth driving an S-type Jag, smoking cigarettes, telling any cop who might dare to pull her over for speeding, "Fuck off, I'm the queen!"

Izzard's Elizabeth II is only a fantasy monarch, a queen who might have been. But the routine may have been Izzard's way of building a sympathetic bridge between Elizabeth II and the daughter-in-law she so clearly disliked, Princess Diana: Diana grabbed the privilege of acting her age in a way Elizabeth II never would have dared, even if she'd wanted to. (And no one can ever know if, maybe just the littlest bit, she ever did want to.)

Stephen Frears' "The Queen" (which opens the New York Film Festival on Friday and will roll out in other parts of the country in the coming weeks), a fictional reading of what might have happened in the week following Diana's death, is another kind of bridge between the two figures. The story begins as a comedy: Who doesn't like to make fun of Elizabeth II, who was old guard even 30 years ago, when the Sex Pistols flipped her the bird? But Frears knows that great comedy is often only a flea bite away from tragedy. Working from a dazzling script by Peter Morgan (who also co-wrote "The Last King of Scotland"), he uses our laughter, and even our derision, to lure us into a place where we can feel only sympathy for a woman locked in a gilded cage of tradition and duty. Often, it takes a fiction to succeed where reality fails. It's part of the real queen's duty to hide the fact that she's human. "The Queen" tears off the royal robe and suggests that, despite what Johnny Rotten said, she is a human being.

The movie opens in the spring of 1997, just as Tony Blair (played here, with the perfect degree of bright-eyed eagerness, by Michael Sheen) has won the election, ushering in the briefly euphoric era of New Labor, which promised to modernize Great Britain. But you don't just waltz into the prime minister's job: You have to be invited by the queen, and so Blair -- accompanied by Cherie, played by the wonderful Helen McCrory as a hissing, petty schemer -- shows up at Buckingham Palace to receive his mandate.

The woman he goes to meet is played by Helen Mirren, but she's a hundred times more intimidating than Helen Mirren is. (This is an actress who makes most men I know, and plenty of women, go weak at the knees.) We already know what she thinks of Blair -- she's appalled, for one thing, that he expects to be called by his first name -- and we see it on her icily composed face as she allows herself to be greeted.

Elizabeth's role, as she puts it, in crisp, fruity tones, is to "advise, warn and guide the government of the day." And also, she might have added, to intimidate the bejesus out of it. Ascertaining that Blair has three children, she turns away from him and mutters the words "Such a blessing, children" as if it were less than an afterthought. Later, she informs him that he's "her" 10th prime minister and wastes no time setting out the largest possible shoes he'll never be able to fill: Churchill, she notes, once sat in the very chair he's just settled into. But then she adds, in a line that alludes to some remaining shred of modesty and insecurity -- a line that presages the ways in which this seemingly predictable character is going to surprise us -- "He gave a shy, young girl like me an education."

Next page: A family of horsey types bred to serve