Private lives

Patty here…

A week ago I saw director Stephen Frears’s (My Beautiful Launderette, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, Dirty Pretty Things) film “The Queen,” starring Helen Mirren. The movie explores the dark days following the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in Paris in August of 1997 and the clash of wills between the newly elected and politically savvy Prime Minister Tony Blair and the old-fashioned and stoically engineered Queen of England, Elizabeth II, over how to respond to Diana’s death.



I vividly remember the day Diana died. I stayed up all night, watching the coverage on television, waiting for good news that never came. I also remember the swelling crowd of mourners fighting back tears and the growing perception, fueled by the press, that the royal family was dishonoring the memory of the “people’s princess” by refusing to acknowledge their shared grief.

Although the film is fiction (nobody but the royal family knows what really went on behind palace doors), Frears, along with screenwriter Peter Morgan and a superb ensemble cast have succeeded in creating a movie with complex, conflicted, and—yes—sympathetic human beings. Helen Mirren’s performance as Queen Elizabeth II is nuanced and moving as she soldiers-on through the tragedy, seemingly perplexed as to why the British people have turned against her.



In a scene from the film, she says:

“Ever since Diana, people want glamour and tears—the grand performance. And I’m not very good at that. I prefer to keep my feelings to myself. Foolishly, I believed that’s what people wanted from their queen. Not to make a fuss nor wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve. Duty first, self second.”

In a Los Angeles Times article on Tuesday, October 31, 2006, Patrick Goldstein explores the fine line between self-expression and self-promotion, which is the theme of “The Queen” and another current film, Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of our Fathers.” Goldstein says:

“Everywhere we look, we live in a confessional age. The novel has been replaced by the memoir as our most talked-about literary genre. The sitcom, for years TV’s water-cooler conversation starter, has been superseded by reality TV and talk shows, forms that thrive on exhibitionism.”

I don’t watch reality TV. For one reason, the idea of it doesn’t interest me. A steady diet of histrionic and often counterfeit emotional outbursts and angry recriminations isn’t very interesting to watch. Conflict is good but it can’t replace complexity. It’s the man or woman who struggles valiantly to hold back his or her emotions out of duty, pride, or fear that captures my imagination.

After watching “The Queen” and reading Goldstein’s article, I began to think about memorable characters in novels I had read. The first one that popped into my mind was Stevens, the dutiful English butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Remains of the Day. Years after finishing the book I still remember weeping as I read the scene in which Stevens stoically goes about his household duties as his father lays dying in the next room.



There is an often-quoted passage from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech given in Stockholm, Sweden on December 10, 1950:

“…the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

So what draws you to certain fictional characters and why do you remember them long after the book is finished or the movie is yesterday's news?

Happy Monday and Happy Birthday to me!