The King's Speech: The Soaring Drama of a Stutter
Here's a trailer for The King's Speech, the British prestige drama that recently won the Toronto Film Festival and is about... a king with a stutter. That's it. But, you know, it's set against the backdrop of WWII and stuff.
King George VI famously suffered from a halting stammer, which caused him great anguish whenever he was made to speak publicly. And with a war dawning, he of course had to make lots of speeches. So he (Colin Firth in the movie) enlisted the help of a speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush). Well, actually, his headstrong wife did, here played by Helena Bonham Carter. Oh how nice it is to see her playing a normal lady, not some rat-haired weird witch of a creature. She's crazy good at that stuff, but she's also good at this stuff (remember Wings of the Dove?), so it's nice to see that she hasn't abandoned it completely. All told this looks pleasantly uplifting and British and chip-chip cheerio and all that. It's probably a little too small to really contend with the Oscar big boys, but we can at least expect Firth, whose wonderful work in last year's A Single Man was overshadowed by the mediocre film around him, to be an awards season favorite.