In Revue: A Fine King, A Bad Sorcerer, and One Rotten Tourist

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie-obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Colin Firth is royally tongue-tied in The King’s Speech. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

This week sees Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, which took People’s Choice honours at TIFF this year, opening in town. Accompanying its considerably regal Toronto premiere are a couple of, well, let’s say “modest” star vehicles.

Unless some conniving studio is planning on releasing a career-defining biopic about a socially maladjusted sports coach with a debilitating illness trying to teach inner city youths how to dream (they end up learning more about themselves and each other, “Spirit In the Sky” fits in there somewhere, roll credits), there’s likely no prestige picture we’ll see this year better baited for awards season than Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech. Hooper’s film has everything. It’s based on a true story. There’s a powerful figure (Colin Firth as King George VI) beset by personal misfortune (a compulsive stutter rendering him unfit to speak to England in the age of the radio address). There’s the rambunctious figure that will work to humanize him (Geoffrey Rush as an “unorthodox” speech pathologist). And there are plenty of respectable performances, courtesy of Firth, Rush, and especially Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth.
It’s also a costume drama. And a Second World War period piece. Oscars in the bank.
This isn’t to say that The King’s Speech is unworthy of the accolades it’s been receiving since it took home this year’s People’s Choice prize at TIFF. It’s not. But it is a bit of a missed opportunity. The film revels in the intoxicating interplay between Firth and Rush, but Hooper spends so much time humanizing Firth’s stammering sovereign that the more compelling historical threads are left dangling. The King’s Speech is a film so propelled by the effortless chemistry shared by its principals (Firth, Rush, and Carter) that it’s easy to forget that it’s just another rote triumph-of-the-human-spirit story dolled up in especially regal rags.
The King’s Speech opens Friday, December 10 in select cinemas. Click here for showtimes.

To say that Angelina Jolie looks like a drag queen isn’t meant as some transphobic snipe. Rather, it’s to say that the particular brand of femininity she plies (and to the n-th degree in The Tourist) is of the most caricatured type. From her chiselled cheekbones to overinflated lips to exaggerated hourglass figure, Jolie is hypersexualized to the point of parody. Co-star Johnny Depp falls similarly in step, playing quirky and bedraggled with a well-manicured precision—not one hair in his Chris Cornell–ish mane ever falls out of place, his chinstrap an immovable shock of scruff.
The Tourist is an exercise in rubbing these two exemplars of top-shelf Hollywood sex appeal against each other to see if anything sparks. No dice. Jolie and Depp possess zero chemistry, their interactions as eye-rollingly rote as the film’s slog through spy thriller rehash. Jolie plays Elise, a boringly buxom femme fatale tied to a key player being chased by a marginally competent team of Scotland Yard scouts (led by Paul Bettany). To throw them off her beau’s trail, she seduces Depp’s Frank, a humble American school teacher vacationing in Europe. As the plot (barely) thickens, working towards a wholly undeserved twist ending, a stunt-cast Steven Berkoff (former supervillain to Bond, Rambo, and others) phones in a performance as a violent gangster, as does Bond himself (Timothy Dalton) as Bettany’s sneering superior. German director von Donnersmarck made his name with the understated 2006 drama The Lives of Others. But subtlety doesn’t suit sexy would-be blockbusters, and here the only evidence that the film was directed at all are the gawky head swivels every time Jolie enters a room.
The Tourist is the kind of flat, wholly unremarkable picture which, like Angel Eyes, Changing Lanes and Body of Lies, you’ll soon forget had even been made. All the better.
The Tourist opens Friday, December 10 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

Casting Helen Mirren as Prospera, an Italian duchess cast off to a deserted island for practising witchcraft, where she is left to mastermind (mistressmind?) her revenge on her scheming brother (the ever-sneering Chris Cooper) and the rest of the royal court that bounced her, Julie Taymor’s Tempest is all visual panache and razzle-dazzle. The effects, especially those animating Prospera’s enslaved nymph Ariel (Ben Whishaw), are impressive. But their obvious function in enlivening what is otherwise just a series of medium-shots of actors in goofy costumes (plush with anachronistic zippers) wrapping their tongues around Shakespeare’s prose is far too obvious.
Then there’s the thorny issue of Djimon Hounsou as painted slave Caliban, the sundry colonial undertones exacerbated by his position under the heel of an actress best known for playing the Queen of England. But we’ll leave grappling with that to all the kids who cried “White Man’s Burden!” when Avatar hit last year. Besides, even more aberrant is Russell Brand as comic whirling dervish Trinculo, a role which proves, well, that Russell Brand is capable of memorizing a bit of Shakespeare.
Taymor’s film may serve an instrumental function, as a potential vehicle for weaning bored, unfocused teenagers onto the Shakespeare bogging down their high school English syllabus. But it’s of little interest to anyone else save the Bard’s most ardent admirers, not yet sated by their annual summer trip to Stratford.
The Tempest opens Thursday, December 16 for a limited run at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West).

CORRECTION: DECEMBER 10, 2010, 1:54 PM This article originally mistakenly said that The Tourist was only playing a limited run at the Lightbox; the blockbuster, of course, is actually in wide release.