The Queen: A

The Queen, with its rambling and episodic structure, is pretty amazing.

Following the week after Princess Diana's car crash in 1997, the movie follows the royal family's rigidity in maintaining public sobriety (or running from the public altogether). That is unthinkable to the public! She was a Princess! She should be mourned by her Queen! The movie however, in all of its wonderous glory, won't be dragged down by public opinion. Peter Morgan's script battles the subject on both sides, often letting the characters debate the issue instead of ourselves. He does it so well in fact that we get two perspectives: the Diana that donated to charities and loved American society, and the Diana that sought to throw everything the crown stood for back into Queen Elizabeth's (Helen Mirren) face.

Witty and revealing, the movie never settles and would have in fact been pulled into several different directions at once (and consequently apart) if not for the magnetic performances at its center. Helen Mirren, who one an Emmy earlier this year for her portrayal of the Virgin Queen, doesn't play flashy or play eccentric. She plays a woman in the midst of a breakdown and she plays her without pause. Contrary to public opinion she grieved for her son, Prince Charles, and her two grandchildren who had lost their mother. She assumed that "as was the British way" everyone would leave her to her quiet mourning. She was wrong. The tides of opinion turned on her and swelled quite suddenly and without the help of new Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) she would have been crushed. Quite literally she was in the midst of a breakdown of the most valued of English institutions: the Monarchy.

The movie suggests numerous things about the crown, most of the probably true, and director Stephen Frears is a man of a suprising amount of talent who takes forays away from the center of the movie that are far from boring or tedious. In a movie that sprawls and rambles it ultimately comes down to one thing: humanity, and the people blessed with it.