I always wanted to catch this since I saw the trailer during Nowhere Boy because I rather enjoy Geoffrey Rush’s acting. It’s good to see him doing something beyond another Pirates flick yet I feel he’s getting typecast into historical stuff: Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love, Frida and Shine. Speech is also a great candidate for the now defunct show Hollywood v. History I so loved on the History Channel (aka the WWII Channel). The experts History interviewed about the Battle of Thermopylae and Pearl Harbor were excellent. A much better, more thorough job than what can be found on Wikipedia which is practically staffed by out-of-work, Right Wing Think Tank employees. Hence, this is why it’s free and only useful on trivial works of fiction and not considered a reliable source for History. A show like H v. H would bring up British officials’ affinities for the Nazis and Fascist Spain…namely Churchill (patron saint of Anglophiles and Conservative Revisionists) siding with Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Now that I’ve gotten my editorial against the subjective (alleged) online encyclopedia, onward about the movie which probably won some Oscars; I don’t follow Hollywood’s self-congratulatory culture enough to care.
The focus is on Prince Albert and his embarrassing stutter as the movie demonstrates in the opening act, some worldwide broadcast he stumbles through around 1925. Since the English (nee German, they used to be the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas) royal family is expected to make numerous public appearances and radio speeches to earn its keep, Albert better get this resolved. So far nothing works. Doctors can’t cure it. Speech pathologists can’t lessen it. I suppose psychological approaches aren’t entertained in this era. Everyone seems pretty set on him to be a national joke but at least he won’t be king.
Princess Elizabeth (still alive and known today as the Queen Mother) decides to seek the aid of Lionel Logue, a radical Aussie in speech pathology circles. Initially both sides are reluctant to work with each other: Logue needs complete trust and the prince is well…a prince, he doesn’t like “commoners” treating him as a peer. Logue gets results though, otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.
Worth Seeing? As a story, this is rather enjoyable and amusing, even funny (allegedly, there may be a PG-13 version which will have Albert’s tirade of swearing cut down). The cast is what made it successful since their real-life counterparts in the English royalty are not really sympathetic people; outside of the American defense budget, the Windsors are the biggest welfare recipients in the West. Speech is really a dramatic, adult version of Disney’s princess productions except it isn’t based upon fictitious (Ariel) or poorly documented (Mulan) figures. When it comes out on DVD, Streaming or Cable, check it out. It only received the Alamo treatment because we had the day off and some wonderful friends gave us gift cards for Christmas.