Humanizing The Vacuum

American audiences were introduced to Colin Firth in The English Patient, in which Firth’s cuckoled husband aimed a plane at Ralph Fiennes and misses, blowing himself up. In 2003′s Love Actually Firth’s doughy hips and doleful mien blended perfectly with the dozen English thespians charged with incarnating various kinds of English suffering. He got an Oscar nomination last year for playing a gay professor of literature mourning the death of his partner in the worthless adaptation of A Single Man.

See the trend? As the go-to guy for chic restrained grief, Firth has become a male Greer Garson. I’ll say this though: he suggests deep reserves of lust and anger which no film has yet tapped (his Mr. Darcy in the 1994 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice came close). In The King’s Speech, Firth does get to yell often as the stammering king in waiting George VI; as an added bonus he unleashes a torrent of profanity at speech therapist Geoffrey Rush that made the geriatrics in the audience titter, as if congratulating Firth for such an uncharacteristic outburst. How delicious!

With its wide-angle closeups and dim interiors, The King’s Speech looks crummy, like a TV movie blown up for theatrical release (examine screenwriter David Seidler credits). Harry Potter regulars Helena Bonham Carter and Michael Gambon and wannabes Guy Pearce and Derek Jacobi either do little with underwritten roles or wander through immense interiors as if the casting director hadn’t  introduced them to their fellow actors. Geoffrey Rush, at his silken, sardonic best (and looking smashing in a pinstriped suit), invests the film with fitful life; he and Firth’s dart-and-bait routine has enough dramatic portent to work on its own as a two-character drama. But The King’s Speech is too comfortable with merely existing as Mrs. Brown meets Good Will Hunting. Of course Oscar will come calling: no Academy voter can resist a film in which a warm, sweater-wearing Robin Williams/Judd Hirsch type coaxes a  tight-assed English patrician into confessing adolescent miseries. George VI (“Bertie”) would never have stammered, the film argues,  had his father and brother loved him. I assume the scene in which Rush, hugging Firth tight in cardiganed arms, whispers, “It’s not your fault” ended up on the cutting room floor.