‘The King’s Speech’ keeps its viewers hanging on every word

By Roger Moore

Orlando Sentinel

His posture, ramrod straight. His manners, impeccable. His breeding and entitlement obvious even if you don’t know his real name is Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George.

But the client who has been signed up for speech therapy by his gently insistent wife is only Mr. Johnson to the down-on-his-heels actor-counselor and therapist. And Mr. Johnson’s problem is as obvious as his awkwardness in simple conversation.

“I buh-bloody well stutter!”

And as “Bertie” begins his therapy, there’s a need for him to get over this. Bertie is The Duke of York, younger brother to the Prince of Wales, and he has speaking engagements. But when his shallow, playboy brother abdicates, Bertie’s speaking calendar will fill up as he becomes king. When Britain is plunged into World War II, a speech by the king to rally the nation is a big deal. Every ear in the empire will hang on every word of “The King’s Speech.”

One of the best films of 2010 captures the funny, touching and inspiring relationship between the man who will become King George VI (Colin Firth) and the brash Aussie (Geoffrey Rush) who tries to figure out why he stutters and to help him over it so that the free world won’t despair every time the stammering, stuttering George opens his mouth.

Firth is the very picture of royal aloofness as Bertie, dragged to a dingy basement flat by Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother (Helena Bonham Carter, terrific), where his new teacher insists that “in here, it’s better that we’re equals.” Rush’s Lionel Logue is a delight, pricking royal decorum, prying into Bertie’s personal life and tricking, cajoling, coaching and coaxing smooth if not exactly fluid sentences from a man who suffers from a fear of public speaking that much of the world shares.

Michael Gambon is the bluff, formidable George V, the imposing father who worries that his dashing eldest son (Guy Pearce, superciliously brilliant) will toss aside the monarchy, or worse, destroy it, with his madcap affair with “that woman,” the infamous Wallis Simpson (Eve Best, a dead ringer for the divorcee).

But the heart and soul of this educational and deliciously entertaining period piece is the student-teacher relationship of Bertie and Lionel. Firth perfectly summons up a lifetime of impatience for this impediment to his speaking voice, impatience and fear. And Rush is playfully impertinent and downright rude, even as he betrays a deep sympathy for the patient’s plight.

But you don’t have to know much of this history or care much for the British Royal Family to delight in this engrossing and moving story of an alternately warm and combative relationship, a tale told in this absurdly R-rated (one scene of comical profanity) screen biography.