Seen Helen Mirren as The Queen? There’s a nice illustration there of fictionalizing history.
The Queen has a theory about the queen. It thinks she and her family did nothing in response to the death of Diana in 1997 because they were hobbled by tradition and spectacularly out-of-touch with the world, as well as naturally unfeeling and insensitive. The film says Queen Elizabeth ordered no royal mourning on staunchly traditional grounds -- because Diana was no longer “Her Royal Highness.” There could be no half-mast flag at Buckingham Palace because flags do not fly there when the royal family is not present. In any case, the Edwardian-thinking royals believed observations of death should be private, personal, discreet and restrained, leaving no space for public mourning and no role for the public.
Frankly, that theory is unconvincing. Okay, sure, the Royals are the epitome of stiff-upper-lip. Still I suspect the Queen and her advisors were a good deal better informed about public relations and the state of the world than the film wants us to imagine. The royals held back from participating in the public’s histrionic mourning for Diana quite simply because they loathed, hated and despised her. Well aware of the public sympathy Diana had cultivated, they hoped that they could discourage the public tide by standing against it. When it became clear they could not, they switched tactics.
Trouble is, you can criticize The Queen as a drama and argue about whether it works as a drama or not. But you can’t argue whether it is bad history or not, because it is not a history. As drama, it works, I’d say. Both Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen are excellent in their roles, and the film brilliantly evokes the characters and situations Stephen Frears has created. As a drama, a fiction about imagined characters, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
But you cannot make any meaningful debate about whether Frears’s interpretation of history is an accurate or reasonable one – because the film is not history, it’s a drama. Either it works as a story or it doesn’t, and I think it does. But that has nothing to do with whether it is a credible version of events.
