Ghost in the Machine: Talking Monarch Blues.
Kevin’s usually right on. I admired this: “Still, perhaps it speaks to a failure of empathy on my part—I usually do well on the Voight-Kampff, I swear—but the question of whether or not an extraordinarily wealthy and catered-for man can manage to overcome his embarrassing speech impediment was not one I found all that engaging in the end.”
Money is not an issue, my friend. You could be as rich as Croesus and still not end up with a good outcome. And you’re not suffering a failure of empathy. If this is the only hook for the film, then it’s a failure at the box office.
A slow motion train wreck is fascinating, because you can see all the technical bits bending, breaking, flying apart. The failure of this film is likely the fact that only a stutterer knows the intricacies of what’s going on during a verbal block ... the struggling to get out the intended word, while the mind is racing to find a substitution, and then trying to reroute the sentence around that substitution in order to come out with something that resembles sense. All this, while watching the listeners to detect pity, impatience ... or the most-feared, judgment. Without a method of clearly illustrating that inner struggle (akin to a sci-fi film in full crisis mode as crewmembers work to save the universe from exploding), noone will understand the main character.
There are a lot of pundits discussing this film, news sources are tapping stuttering journalists to get their takes. Each one overlong, revealing the commonality to all stutterers: we just want to be normal, and our low self-confidence requires that we offer long-winded explanations to those who don’t know or understand our malady. I suspect this film is just as plodding.
For myself, a come-and-go stutterer, I don’t think I’m going to view the film in theatre. Michael Palin in “A Fish Called Wanda” caught the ridiculousness and made me feel better about my malady (even so, I couldn’t speak fluently for a week afterwards - sample. Makes my throat seize up just to watch a couple of seconds of it). “King’s Speech” sounds dismal to me.
My final question is, did they deal with the fact that the most famous voice of WWII in Britain, the voice even America rallied around, was Winston Churchill - another stutterer?
Comments:
See? If you need to explain the joke, it’s a wasted effort at making the joke. An average audience will never have enough knowledge to really appreciate the film. Big mistake on the part of the moviemakers.
They should have had Geoffrey Rush (if he’s the character I suspect) do a pre-introduction-to-George voiceover about the nature of stuttering. Or something similar ... some exposition to explain what was going on.
This sounds prejudicial, but only another stutterer will fully appreciate one’s efforts to become fluent. Whenever I meet another stutterer, I always say, “You realize we’re heroes, don’t you?”
There’s always an answering blink, nod and a smile. We know. We don’t need to say.
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It doesn’t come across as eloquently as you put it, but Colin Firth does manage to convey an existential horror in his situtation. And your description of the engine at work actually makes some of Geoffrey Rush’s prescriptions (swear to yourself in the downtime, “jump” onto P’s, etc.) seem more interesting.
I still think I was a little hard on this movie (and also too easy on TRON.) It’s a good movie, but also one I found very perfunctory and Oscar-baity in its execution.
On Churchill’s stammer: It’s only mentioned in passing, as Winston gives the King an atta-boy before his September 3rd address to the nation.