JOLLY DAYS

The Queen

Stephen Frears' The Queen won some awards but it isn't his best movie. By a long shot. Focusing a movie around the wooden figurehead of Elizabeth II, even in her private moments a void, and then trying to squeeze some humanity out of her so the audience can empathize, seems a fool's errand. Movies that seek to anoint the honor of duty and offer the costs of repressed feeling as proof of great sacrifice require a central character with an interior life.

The dramatic core of the movie was the death of Diana, another poor calculation on Frears' part. The interest in the spectacle around Diana's death was in the calculus of the hive mind. If you want to see a Frears movie, see the excellent My Beautiful Laundrette.