The King's Speech was an incredible movie driven by the best cast of the year. Unfortunately, because of Colin Firth's incredible performance, which I'll get to shortly, the other performances are overshadowed. In this movie you got Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Ian McKellen and Guy Pearce among many others. What they did was they for once didn't over play their parts. Its easy for Colin Firth for instance to overact his stammer or wow the academy like Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. What Colin Firth does is he holds a lot of restraint in his role. Why? Because real people don't overact in every day life. We are a lot more placid and stoic than the majority of characters on screen. By acting more like a real person with a stammer as opposed to an academy award hungry thesbian, Colin Firth allows the audience to sympathize with him more.
In Cinderella Man you were rooting for Russel Crowe not because of his performance but because of the story, in 127 Hours you were rooting for James Franco out of sympathy for his situation, but you find yourself rooting for Colin Firth in this movie because of his performance. His perfomance evokes the emotion from the audience. Yeah its a great story but who the hell cares about England anyway? We don't. We care about his character because of the way he is displayed as one of us.
What a symbolic aspect of the movie, that one of the hardest words for him to say is "king". He doesn't advertise it and the dialogue never addresses it, but subtly he shows his difficulty with saying that word above all the rest. Just by something so small, he allows us to enter is psychi and see his disillusionment with the throne. Let us not passover Tom Hooper's directoring either. I have and always will think that smoke looks cool on screen. It somehow enhances the imagery of the film. He used it often and very well. Another technique he used frequently was the orchestral background stringing Colin Firth's words together. With good patience and timing the forte of the music escalated to a triumphant conclusion, leaving the audience in awe of the climatic speech at the film's conclusion. The King never stammered in his speech, as the movie never stammered or hiccuped once throughout its entirety. The audience could only marvel as it watched the fluid motion of the film culminate in the King's Speech. This film, in my humble opinion, is the best movie of the year.
-Brian Gallagher
Jury's Verdict: A
