The King's Speech And The Art Of Storytelling

By John McDonnell

The other night I saw The King’s Speech, a film about Britain’s King George VI, who had a crippling stammer and overcame it in the 1920s and 30s with the help of an Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue.

You know how when you see a good movie you can’t stop thinking about it, sometimes for days afterward? The King’s Speech has stayed with me for days now, and I keep replaying its scenes in my mind.

And it’s making me realize that I haven’t had that experience in the last several years of moviegoing. It’s been a long time since a movie has had that kind of impact on me.

Why is that? The King’s Speech is an old-fashioned movie, one that emphasizes character development over everything else. There are long scenes with only two characters, King George and the speech therapist, simply talking.

There are no car crashes, alien invasions, cartoon sequences, explosions, earthquakes, or monsters. There are no superheroes. You don’t have to put on 3-D glasses to watch this film.

It’s just people talking, revealing themselves through their conversation, interacting, showing (or trying to hide) their feelings, and doing what humans do every day.

Not much in the slam-bang department, but it’s still powerful stuff.

The reason is that through the course of the film we get to know these characters intimately. We see what their fears are, what motivates them, how they react to stress, what they love, what they hope for. The King, played by Colin Firth, shows his vulnerability, his fear of public speaking, and with every stammering word out of his mouth we see the pain of a troubled childhood.

Lionel Logue, played masterfully by Geoffrey Bush, is a man struggling with his own insecurities, while also trying to make sense of the fact that the King of England has come to him, a commoner from Australia, to ask for help.

These simple but profound scenes are rare in movies today. With all the explosions and special effects going on in movies, there is very little room for character development. It’s almost as if the moviemakers want to keep our eyes busy with a lot of flashing lights so we won’t realize their characters are cardboard-thin and their stories have no coherence or logic.

Or maybe it’s just that directors are like kids playing with toys. They get so wrapped up in all the new technology they forget to tell a story.

Humans have been telling stories to each other for thousands of years, and it’s not hard to do. You simply need to present some rounded, three dimensional characters and give them a conflict to work out. The characters can’t be cardboard cutouts moving against a background of computer graphics. They need to have rough edges. The good guys have to show their weaknesses. The bad guys have to show a common humanity, not simply be cartoonishly bad all the time. The story has to grow out of character conflicts, and you can’t have a superhero come in and rescue them at the end.

I mean, really, for all the hype about last year’s Avatar, did it stay with you for more than a few hours after you saw it? I loved the alien world that was presented in that movie, but I forgot about it an hour after I left the theater. The characters and their problems just didn’t seem real to me, didn’t grab me. The King’s Speech, however, was made for a tenth of the price of Avatar, and had not a single special effect, yet I’ve been thinking about it all week.

For my money, that’s a real story.