Winning royal pedigree

SECOND in line to the English throne, Bertie, aka Albert (Colin Firth), is afflicted by a debilitating stutter.

The rise of radio as a mass medium in the 1920s, and the subsequent onus on the royal family to engage with its subjects, is reason enough for the desperate prince to approach unorthodox speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), but the abdication of Bertie’s brother, King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), and the prospect of war with Hitler’s Germany, makes the curing of Bertie’s speech impediment a matter of vital national importance.

The King’s Speech (UK/12A/118 mins) offers an intriguing look at the minutiae of royal life, particularly during a time of crisis, but Tom Hooper’s film is a more emotionally enthralling experience than the bare bones of its synopsis might suggest. Logue’s farsighted approach to curing Bertie’s stutter involves digging beneath the prince’s stiff public persona to get at the psychological reasons for his impediment, which in turn leads to a poignant portrait of the man who would become King George VI.

A superb dynamic between Firth and Rush provides the impetus for the story, as the initially abrasive relationship develops into a cautious rapport between the haughty prince and the irreverent commoner, with David Seidler’s screenplay giving both men a wealth of pithy one-liners.

Elsewhere, Hooper has assembled an impressive supporting cast that includes Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Jennifer Ehle, Timothy Spall and an unusually likeable Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, aka the Queen Mother, who is Bertie’s rock-solid pillar throughout his travails.

An absorbing drama that belies its two-hour running time and appropriately stately pace to exert a compelling grip, The King’s Speech is above all an acute psychological insight into the machinations of power that lies behind every throne.

THE Next Three Days (US/12A/132 mins) is a Hollywood remake of the French movie Anything for Her (2008), in which mild-mannered schoolteacher John Brennan (Russell Crowe) decides to break his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), out of one of America’s toughest prisons.

Paul Haggis, who directs his own adaptation of Fred Cavayé’s original script, does full justice to Anything for Her, expertly building tension right from the point when the law-abiding John is forced to decide between allowing his innocent wife rot in jail, or to start thinking the unthinkable.

The hook here, apart from the morality of John’s decision, is the practical question of how an ordinary person with no criminal connections might go about organising a jailbreak. Crowe is suitably understated in the lead role and all the more compelling for his apparent ordinariness.

The neatly defined relationship with his young son Luke (Ty Simpkins) adds poignancy and motive, and there are excellent cameos from Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde and particularly Brian Dennehy, who is superb in what is virtually a wordless role. At well over two hours, it errs on the long side for a thriller, but Haggis’s pacing and Crowe’s performance dovetail to create an absorbing film.

BASED on a true story, 127 Hours (US/15A/93 mins) is the harrowing tale of Aron Ralston (James Franco), who left home one weekend for a routine hike across the unforgiving landscape of rural Utah, and wound up trapped in a narrow canyon with his arm pinned beneath an immovable boulder.

Similar in tone and story to Touching the Void (2003), the film is a celebration of the strength of the human spirit, as Ralston at first devises ingenious ways to keep himself warm, watered and sane, and then, as the days pass and he belatedly accepts that help is not going to arrive, comes up with a stomach-churning plan to set himself free.

Director Danny Boyle (who co-wrote the script with Simon Beaufoy, which was adapted from Ralston’s own account, Between a Rock and a Hard Place) works inventively within the narrow confines of Ralston’s prison, emphasising the claustrophobia and hopelessness of his cause, and only rarely taking the easy option of allowing Ralston flashbacks or dream sequences to break the monotony of his situation.

The film, of course, is heavily dependent on Franco’s role, given that he’s the only character on screen for most of the 93 minutes, and the actor puts in what should be a breakout performance, persuasive when depicting Ralston’s physical and psychological agony, but never so intensely as to alienate the audience from Ralston’s very private pain. In fact, it’s to Franco and Boyle’s credit that the show-stopping scene in which Ralston cuts off his own arm with a blunt penknife is no more luridly or exploitatively treated than that of Ralston’s existential angst.