BEFORE: Messed-up British Royalty week continues with this film - all I really know about King George III is that he reigned when Great Britain lost the Revolutionary War. Maybe this will explain a lot. Linking backwards a bit, Timothy Dalton was also in "Mary, Queen of Scots" with Ian Holm, who appears tonight. A lot of the same actors keep turning up in these stuffy British films, which helps me out a lot. If that's cheating, then Nigel Terry from "The Lion in Winter" was also in "Excalibur" with Helen Mirren. So there.
THE PLOT: A meditation on power and the metaphor of the body of state, based on the real episode of dementia experienced by George III,
AFTER: What are people supposed to think when their king starts rambling incoherently, putting the moves on women who aren't the Queen, and going to the bathroom in public? See, that's rock-star behavior right there, real Keith Richards-type stuff.
How do you separate this from the regular behavior of the royalty, who have been told for hundreds of years that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want? How long before someone suspects that the man is not just eccentric, but insane? How can he be treated when his doctors treat the king with such respect that they don't even feel comfortable examining him?
Pointing out a king's faults, be they medical problems, sexual proclivities or personality traits, all go a long way in a movie toward humanizing them - the feet of clay, as it were. I suspect I'll be seeing a lot of that this week.
America barely gets a mention here, George doesn't seem like he has much of a bad reputation for losing the colonies. A few people say things like "Did you hear they are called United States now? Raw-ther..." It's funny, even with his losing foreign policies and crazy antics, George still is portrayed as a better alternative to making the Prince of Wales the new king. Turns out there were spin doctors even back then, some pulling for the King and some for advancing the Prince. Give me our two-term presidential system any day - even with all its faults, our system only allows someone to screw up the country for 8 years, max.
Reading Shakespeare is part of the King's therapy (ooh, King Lear - irony!) and this sort of reminds me that I've passed up the opportunity to work in some Shakespeare movies, like "Henry V" might have fit here in the chain, or "Richard III", etc. Oh, well, I don't have copies of those films, or much interest really, so Billy Shakespeare can suck it. The chain rolls on...
Also starring Nigel Hawthorne, Helen Mirren (last heard in "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole"), Rupert Everett (last heard in "The Wild Thornberrys Movie"), Rupert Graves (last seen in "V For Vendetta"), Amanda Donohoe (last seen in "Liar Liar"), with a cameo from John Wood (it drove me nuts, where have I seen him before - ah, he played Falken in "Wargames").
RATING: 5 out of 10 powdered wigs
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