Reign Storm

The Queen

The New York Sun, September, 29, 2006

Within a few weeks, American moviegoers will be given the chance to wallow in the glitz, glamour, and guillotines of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette." For now they will have to make do with a dowdier, more discreet queen, the one who has been reigning in England for more than half a century now, a monarch who shows every sign of hanging on to her crown and, thankfully, the head on which it sits.

In all the decades of Elizabeth II's painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) dutiful, conscientious, and, yes, tenacious reign, there has only really been one brief, bizarre period, of just about a week, when there was the slightest danger that the Windsors might, like so many of their less fortunate relatives in so many less fortunate countries, be asked to pack their bags. It's that interlude, the disturbing, absurd and even slightly frightening days that followed the death of Princess Diana that is the focus of "The Queen," a compelling new docudrama by British director Stephen Frears that opens the 44th New York Film Festival on Saturday. It's easily the best film I've seen this year.

From that tunnel in Paris to Earl Spencer in Westminster Abbey, these events are still so familiar that Mr. Frears is left free to concentrate on the most interesting aspect of the story: the plight of a monarch at bay, puzzled, hurt, and confused by the behavior of a nation, her nation, that appeared to have changed, almost overnight, beyond all recognition. The quiet, disciplined, loyal, stoical Brits of the Queen's youth, of the Blitz, of so much more, had vanished, to be replaced by a volatile, hysterical, and vindictive mob caught up in a self-indulgent bacchanalia of grief for a princess they never really knew. Suddenly Elizabeth's virtues — restraint, self-control, that famous sense of duty — had come to be seen as vices by a population baying for her to show that she "cared" by faking tears over the death of the more "genuine" Diana.

The movie itself begins about four months earlier, setting the scene with Tony Blair's 1997 landslide election victory and then the first audience between the novice prime minister (a puppyish Michael Sheen) and the veteran queen (Helen Mirren), coolly charming, intimidating, and on top of her game. It's beautifully observed and very funny (Peter Morgan's script is a consistent delight, meticulously researched and, I suspect, largely accurate), but Dame Helen really comes into her own (Oscar! Oscar!) as events begin to engulf the embattled monarch.

Helped by the hairdo that launched a million stamps, her own surprisingly strong facial resemblance to the Queen and, dare I say it, more than a little padding (there goes my knighthood), the former Inspector Tennison turns out to make an uncannily realistic Elizabeth II. More precisely, Dame Helen plays a woman playing the Queen, an approach that goes a long way to explaining why she is so remarkably convincing. Monarchy is a performance. The Queen's tragedy is that it's a role she almost certainly never wanted. The Queen's genius is that she does it so well.

Nevertheless, watch Her Majesty carefully enough (as many of us English tend to do) and it's just possible to detect that the smile, the wave, the small talk, and all the rest of it are acts of will, the work of an actress, a pro, trapped in a role that will last a lifetime. And in her performance, Dame Helen catches this perfectly. Every now and then she lets glimpses of the real Elizabeth, that long-vanished Lilibet, peep through, and then, abruptly, deliberately, the face freezes, the mask is put back on, and safe, comfortable distance returns.

When, in the middle of the crisis, she lets her guard drop just enough to ask her mother (Sylvia Syms, who rather surprisingly chooses to portray the Queen Mum as a sitcom gran) for advice, that advice is, like that of her husband (James Cromwell playing Prince Philip as a caricature of himself, which of course, he really is) absolutely hopeless. An agonized, nervous Prince Charles (Alex Jennings, splendidly twitchy) and her principal adviser have the right instincts, but are too intimidated by her to do much good. The old pro is, she discovers, isolated, alone, adrift. The script no longer works, and the audience is out of control.

Eventually, help, and a new scriptwriter, shows up in the shape of an increasingly assured Tony Blair, a master politician with an instinctive understanding of the new Britain and, critically, what the royals would have to do to win back public favor. He's the self-proclaimed modernizer on a mission to transform what was left of the Queen's old England, but he's also astute enough to want the monarchy to survive, and, despite the gibes of his colleagues and his wife, fair enough to appreciate all that the Queen had done for her realm.

As for the woman whose death triggered the whole crisis, her image flits and flickers through the movie in clip after clip of archive footage, the only one of the film's protagonists not to be played by an actor. It's a clever device: It adds to the sense of authenticity and serves also as a pointed reminder of just how much that lost princess was fantasy, creation, accomplice, and victim. The texture of that footage — faded, grainy, herky-jerky, recognizably different from the rest of the film, almost ghostlike in impact — only serves to underline that Diana had gone, never to return.

In the end, as we all know, the fever broke. The film concludes as it began with Mr. Blair visiting Buckingham Palace. No longer the novice, he is confident, too confident, perhaps, a politician at the peak of his popularity, and angling, maybe, for a word of thanks for all his help. What he gets instead is a warning on the fickleness of our age. "One day," the Queen says, "quite suddenly and without warning, the same thing will happen to you." And now, of course, it has. Meanwhile, the monarchy itself endures and Diana's memory fades. On the fifth anniversary of her death, one writer noted that the gardens of Althorp (the Spencer family home) and Kensington Palace were "deserted."

"The public," he wrote, "had moved on. They were now too busy 'never forgetting' other people."

Diana, Again

National Review Online, October 6, 2001

There is, let's admit it, something grimly satisfying about having a prejudice confirmed. So, if you are one of those people who believe that there is absolutely nothing more to say about Charles and Di, Christopher Andersen's new work, Diana's Boys, is the book for you. Once again weary readers are presented with the same shop-soiled menagerie (mean queen, pained prince, plain Camilla, horrible Hewitt, foolish Fergie, loveable Tiggy, playboy Dodi), the same exhausted anecdotes (hysteria at Highgrove, bulimia in the palace, Charles' confession of adultery, Diana's TV interview, the rudeness at Harry's birth), and, above all, that same doomed, fascinating heroine, bewitching and manipulative, a Sybil in Chanel, with her bewildering, ever-shifting personality leading all those around her to ruin and to despair.

We know how her story will end, of course. We are told again about those last tragic hours in Paris, that speedy departure from the Ritz and the disaster in a tunnel, hours that will be particularly familiar to fans of Mr. Andersen, in that he had already discussed them at some length in an earlier bestseller, The Day Diana Died. Now, Mr. Andersen, the author of two books about Katharine Hepburn, three volumes about the Kennedys, and two works about Princess Diana, is clearly a man who is not too worried about reworking a profitable subject. It is best, however, if such a return to the mother lode can be justified by the claim that something fresh is being discovered. The kindly Ms. Hepburn has, most obligingly for her biographers, been very long-lived, leaving plenty of room for the two, doubtless distinct, efforts by Mr. Andersen, Young Kate and The Remarkable Love Story of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The Kennedys enjoyed far less staying power than the formidable actress, but, in their case Mr. Andersen could, presumably, reduce the risk of repeating himself by moving across, then down, the former First Family tree. He followed Jack and Jackie with Jackie after Jack, and then, in a confirmation of his mortuary franchise, he gave us The Day John Died.

In Diana's case, however, going back to the celebrity seam was not so straightforward. The inconveniently dead princess lacked Ms. Hepburn's powers of survival. A "Young Diana" was all there ever was, and all there ever would be. There were no long decades, just a few short years filled with incident, almost all of which Mr. Andersen had already chronicled. The Kennedy alternative, harvesting the family tree, was also tricky in the case of the gloomy royals. Compared with JFK the poor princess lacked a sellable surviving spouse. Who, other than Camilla, who would go for Charles after Diana?

That only left the sons, William and Harry, in Diana's words, her "one splendid achievement", and so they appear to be. But as camouflage for an opportunistic retelling of the Spencer story, her offspring prove hopelessly inadequate. This is hardly their fault. They may, in the words of Mr. Andersen's publisher be "the world's two most celebrated royals" (eat your heart out, Elizabeth), but they simply have not done enough to carry a biography. This would be true of almost any teenager. Diana's children are no exception, as a quick glance at this book's index reveals.

Entries under "William, Prince" include "backside pinching of… e-mail romances of…formality disliked by… Harry dangled from window by." Take away the story of their parents, and the Windsor princelings' lives are the stuff of trivia. While that is not a bad level for Mr. Andersen's writing style ("Finally, the Princess of Wales leaned forward to see what the boys' found so riveting: steamy photos of the buxom Barbi twins, Playboy centerfold models Shane and Sia") he is astute enough to know that, when it comes to book sales, his best hopes still lie with Diana. So, much of what we get is a tired rehash of a failed marriage and a tragic death, with, on occasion, the only variety coming, quite literally, from the pagination.

On page 43 of Diana's Boys, for instance, we can read that "William's mother indulged in an orgy of self-mutilation. At various times, Diana slashed her wrist with a razor, stabbed herself in the chest with a pocketknife, cut herself with the jagged edge of a lemon peeler, and hurled herself against a glass display case, shattering it." This is a drama that may be familiar to admirers of page 49 of The Day Diana Died where readers are told that "in an orgy of self-mutilation, at various times Diana slashed her wrist with a razor, stabbed herself in the chest with a pocketknife, cut herself with the jagged edge of a lemon peeler, and hurled herself against a glass display case, shattering it."

The only difference between these two accounts lies in the description of its protagonist. In Diana's Boys the lemon-peeler-wielding princess is also, in keeping with the theme of a book allegedly focused on her sons, described as "William's mother," rather than just the "Diana" used in the earlier text.

To be fair, there are some revelations (at least to this Brit) in the more recent book. I was, for example, unaware of the fact that, in an unorthodox variant of the curt handshake generally preferred by the English upper classes, one socialite allegedly prefers to greet Prince William by putting her hand down the front of his trousers. For the most part, however, even those parts of Diana's Boys that relate specifically to the children cover fairly familiar ground, if in ever more excruciating detail. In The Day Diana Died, Mr. Andersen tells us that William once "tried to flush his father's shoe down the toilet", while in Diana's Boys, we learn that they were "four-hundred-dollar" shoes.

More excruciating for William, should he ever look at this book, will be the speculation about his love life, speculation helpfully illustrated by an inspired selection of photographs that manages to include seductive pictures of no fewer than three cuties whose names (Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Emma Parker Bowles, Davina Duckworth-Chad) seem more substantial than the outfits that they are wearing. For the time being, however, both the young princes seem remarkably well balanced given what they have been through, but it is difficult to read Mr. Andersen's book without wondering whether Diana's boys are destined to share some of the bleaker aspects of their parents' fate.

For, while the source of many of Charles and Diana's problems lay in their own personalities (well summarized in Sally Bedell Smith's Diana in Search of Herself, psychobabble-heavy, but nevertheless the best single account of the whole miserable saga) other factors were also very much to blame. In particular, the royal couple had to contend with the challenge of living in a country that no longer knew what it wanted from its monarchy. Like their predecessors, the prince and princess were public figures, but the public had changed. To their cost, Charles and Diana were to discover that the old deference was dead, taking with it the stuffily comfortable etiquette that once cocooned the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace. It had been replaced by a relentlessly intrusive tabloid-driven agenda that mixed class resentment and prurience with the curiously old-fashioned notion that the Royal Family should set some sort of example, although no one seemed to be able to agree on what that example should be.

It is worth remembering that when, in the bawling, mawkish week that followed Diana's death, the formerly vilified princess was being sanctified for allegedly being able to show her true feelings, the Queen was at the same time coming under attack in the press ("Show us you care") for failing to fake hers. What Fleet Street wanted from Her Majesty ("Speak to us Ma'am — Your people are suffering") was a blubbering expression of regret for a former daughter-in-law she clearly no longer really cared for.

Poor William ("the heir") and, to a lesser extent, Harry ("the spare") face a lifetime of trying to satisfy the conflicting, unclear, and capricious demands of such scrutiny, of which Mr. Andersen's book is an early, and relatively harmless, example.

No wonder William is said to doubt whether he wants to be king.