You don’t hold a single position of global celebrity for 70 years without becoming a cinematic figure too. Whether wildly fictionalised or painstakingly rendered in biographical terms, the Queen has racked up a rare screen legacy for a living historical figure. For most of her life she has been treated on film as a literal icon, as close as any actor can possibly come to the impassive crowned symbol of sundry postage stamps. Portraying her as an actual character, with inner life and conflict, would come later.
My first encounter with a dramatised Elizabeth II remains, for me, the most enduring: as the ward of serially incompetent police lieutenant Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun (Netflix). The target of an assassination attempt foiled only by happy, hilarious accident, she’s not a terribly active presence in the film – mainly there to look regally endangered, and at one point pitch a ceremonial baseball with dour poise. But she is sufficiently convincing that, at age eight or so, I was convinced that the monarch herself had agreed to this undignified cameo.
As it is, all credit goes to Jeannette Charles, a single-character actor who parlayed her striking resemblance to Her Majesty into multiple assignments over three decades, in projects ranging from German ape-movie spoof Queen Kong to slicker Hollywood gagfests, including National Lampoon’s European Vacation (Amazon Prime) and Austin Powers in Goldmember (Netflix). We thank her for her droll service, even if she never got any trophies for her pains.
I wonder if Jeannette Charles felt the tiniest twang of resentment when Helen Mirren played the title role in Stephen Frears’s 2006 drama The Queen (Amazon Prime) and promptly mopped up every best actress prize on offer, including an Oscar. It was the first film ever to treat Elizabeth II as a case for psychological study: as scripted by Peter Morgan, Mirren’s portrayal of the Queen’s guilt, insecurity and resentment toward a hostile public in the wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales made many viewers reconsider their feelings about her feelings.
I’ve always found the film, along with Mirren’s skilful performance, a little clenched and tentative – but it opened the gates for a new wave of humanising dramatic portrayals of Elizabeth II and her family. The Oscar-laden The King’s Speech (Netflix) gave us a glimpse of Princess Elizabeth (played by Freya Wilson) in cherubic girlhood, but she’s a more substantial adolescent presence in the surprisingly charming A Royal Night Out (2015; BFI Player), which essentially drafts Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and their imagined VE Day capers, on to a wholesome teen-romance template. The excellent Canadian actor Sarah Gadon gives Elizabeth some soul and pluck.
All those films paved the way for Netflix television colossus The Crown (creator and showrunner: Peter Morgan), with its shifting evocation of the modern royal family through the decades. In terms of offering almost every national treasure of the British acting community steady work for a time, it has effectively become the new Harry Potter franchise. It has yielded Emmy wins for both Claire Foy’s and Olivia Colman’s deft, emotionally quivering portrayals of the Queen; Imelda Staunton is next in line to that particular throne. Last year’s gloriously melodramatic Diana fantasy Spencer (Amazon Prime) reversed the trend by once more depicting Elizabeth II in a hard, cool light, with the Scottish actor Stella Gonet lending her horror-villain hauteur.
On the lighter side, the Queen continues to be a goofy sideshow in such kid’s films as The Queen’s Corgi (Apple TV), where she is plumply voiced by Julie Walters, and Steven Spielberg’s peculiar Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG (Netflix), of which Penelope Wilton’s drolly benevolent monarch is one of the more successful elements. You doubt the Queen herself is terribly bothered: after all, she sent herself up quite affably opposite Daniel Craig’s James Bond in Danny Boyle’s playful London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony (YouTube), even if a stand-in did the more physical derring-do. Her cinematic ambitions only go so far.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Reflection (BFI Player) Valentyn Vasyanovych’s seething, timely drama about a Ukrainian surgeon battling PTSD after having been captured by Russian forces in the Donbas region was the most bluntly powerful and formally rigorous film in last year’s Venice competition. Riddled with startlingly but appropriately violent imagery, it was always going to struggle to find distribution, so it’s heartening to see the BFI Player granting it an exclusive release on their platform. You’ll have to steel yourself going in, but Vasyanovych’s artistry rewards the viewer’s nerve.
Licorice Pizza (Universal) Finally, a Blu-ray release for one of the year’s most purely pleasurable films: Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy, sun-warmed coming-of-age comedy set in the same 1970s San Fernando Valley milieu as Boogie Nights – but with a gentler outlook. As a teenage boy and twentysomething woman trying to figure out much in life – not least what their awkwardly tender relationship even is – Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman give this episodic amble a quickened heartbeat.
The Burning Sea (Elysian) Norwegian production company Fantefilm has established a neat line in ecologically minded disaster films, beginning with 2015’s gripping, Hollywood-styled The Wave. This story of a catastrophic oil spill in the North Sea is in a similar vein, with resourceful special effects and a suitably pounding sense of peril – though the wan human drama makes it feel a lesser cousin to the excellent Deepwater Horizon.
