It's the Queen's English, Innit?

The first and most unnerving thing about this film are the scenes that feature 6, 7 or eight year-old princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. It is completely impossible to see them without feeling jarred and second-guessed by our own memories of the dessicated, pinched, cornered vision of Englishness that the Windsors have come to represent.

It's a wonderful piece of drama in spite of the protagonists. Deceitful, fraudulent Australian 'therapist' hoodwinks desperate, pompous Royal into bizarre theatre-based treatment regime for his stutter. You'd think it would be hard to make anything dramatic or engaging cinematically with this. By the simple expedient of using a chilly, foggy, dusty lighting and design aesthetic (thereby side-stepping the emetic heritage visual cues that get these films flogged to death abroad) and getting brilliant actors in close-up like Rush and Bonham-Carter to, well, act, and not do anything to distract from this, it works rather beautifully. Guy Pearce is pallid, acidic, petulant, honest and thereby blends into the film excellently.