The Queen
The Queen portrays the reactions of Queen Elizabeth II and newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the change that it brought to the relationship between the people of England and the royal family. Or perhaps the change was just in the queen’s understanding of her relationship to the people. Helen Mirren portrays the monarch, with James Cromwell as her grumpy husband, Prince Philip, who is even less willing to recognize and deal with the public outpouring of grief than the queen is. Secluded at their enormous Scottish estate of Balmoral, Philip’s plan for helping Diana’s sons (virtually invisible in the movie) is to take them deer hunting. Prince Charles, meanwhile, is equally broken up over the loss of the boys’ mother (whom, he pointedly tells his mother, was never afraid to show affection to her sons) and fear of the public reaction to his part in driving Diana out of the royal family.
PM Blair, meanwhile, has to balance the etiquette of dealing with the queen with the need to, as he puts it, “save these people from themselves”. But Elizabeth is a sympathetic character in this movie. Inheriting the role of monarch at the age of 25, her role transformed without her even realizing it. At least that is the out that the movie provides to explain her public bungling of the aftermath of Diana’s death. Stuck in an age where the monarch is apart and above her subjects, she failed to recognized that she now lives in a world full of royalty, namely celebrities. And the rules for celebrity behavior are decidedly different than the rules the queen had learned. Diana understood celebrity, and her death taught her family something about it.