(2010) In 1925 in front of an expectant audience at the palace, facing for the first time a microphone, ready to broadcast his address over a wireless to the greater British public, the Duke of York (Colin Firth) hesitates in a long silence before stammering into his speech. His father, King George V (Michael Gabon), is easily exasperated by his younger son's tongue-tied struggles to speak fluently.

After various efforts from experts - including smoking cigarettes (intended to help him relax and gain confidence) and a classical method (successfully employed by Demosthenes) of attempting to speak with marbles in his mouth - having failed to cure him of his handicap and discouraged his further desire to seek treatment, the Duke's anxious wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) pays a visit in 1936 to Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian speech therapist with a reputation for an unorthodox, controversial, yet successful practice.

Referring to herself as Mrs Johnson: "My husband's work involves a great deal of public speaking." Logue: "Then he should change jobs." She: "He can't." Logue: "What is he, an indentured servant?" She: "Something like that."

In his first meeting with Logue, who insists on calling the Duke by his familiar name Bertie and on their being on equal terms for the duration of daily sessions in the therapist's spacious office ("My game, my turf, my rules"), Bertie soon displays his obstinacy and temper, departing in disgust after reading for a phonograph recording Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy while headphones loudly played from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, preventing him from hearing himself recite.

Back in the palace, Bertie's father has taken ill and his older brother, the Prince of Wales (Guy Pearce), whom he calls David, is a reluctant heir to the throne in love with Wallis Simpson (Eve Best), an unhappily married American seeking her second divorce. Finally listening to the recording of his recital, Bertie hears himself pronouncing the words without fault.

Director Tom Hooper's emotionally uplifting historical drama, from David Seidler's screenplay, holds attention by tightening the tension on the man who must find is voice after he becomes King George VI, following his father's death, his brother King Edward VIII's abdication, and Hitler's invasion of Europe. Watching the German Fuhrer's powerful, passionate performance on film, Bertie realizes the critical importance of his being able to inspire his subjects in the face of the coming onslaught.

Initially Logue acquiesces to Bertie's wanting only to have his speech mechanics corrected with daily exercises, but the underlying cause of his impediment is psychological, arising from fear at age four or five under his father's strict disciplinary measures to change his sinister-handedness to right-handedness while David teased and taunted him. The regimen of tricks to keep a continuous flow of sound include swearing and singing.

After trust develops between Bertie and Logue, the Duke angrily dismisses his therapist for suggesting ("treason") that he has shown the perseverance and fortitude necessary to be worthy of the crown. Furthermore, Logue has been found out to have neither degree nor credentials to be a doctor of speech pathology, but rather he was a failure in his ambition to become a Shakespearean actor.

Self-reliant and self-assured, the qualities he's attempting to nurture in Bertie, Lionel explains how through his experience of working with shell-shocked Aussie soldiers returning from the Great War he developed his often effective techniques.

Prior to his coronation, Bertie on the threshold of taking the throne in Winchester Cathedral, becomes terribly agitated with Lionel for impertinently taking a seat in St Edward's chair: "Get up! Y-you can't sit there! GET UP!" Lionel: "Why not? It's a chair…. People have carved their names on it." His majesty: "L-listen to me... listen to me!" Lionel: "Why should I waste my time listening to you?" His majesty: "Because I have a voice!"

In 1939 at the outset of World War II, as King George VI on his way to deliver the most important speech of his life to the nation approaches the recently appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, he pauses before the great orator Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall), who confides of having overcome a speech defect in his youth, which he'd learned to employ to his advantage.

As an example of the power of language alone, this superb film has been rated R - not because of any scenes of nudity, sex, or violence - but merely for a series of epithets repeated more than a dozen times during therapy. Having been encouraged to begin smoking to treat his stammer, King George VI, who inhales cigarettes throughout the movie (though Lionel cautions him: "I believe sucking smoke into your lungs will kill you"), died at age 56 in 1952, from lung cancer and other ailments, and was succeeded to the throne by his older daughter Elizabeth, who appears in the film with her sister Margaret as a child.

A curious reunion of sorts occurs with the role of Lionel's wife Myrtle being played by Jennifer Ehle, who was Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC-TV mini-series of Pride and Prejudice to Colin Firth's Mr Darby.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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