Colin, Colin, Colin will you just stop it. After spending years in the rom-com wasteland you follow up the superb A Single Man with the fabulous King's Speech.
OK so its not heart-wrencher like A Single Man and a costume drama about a member of the royal family overcoming a terrible stammer isn't making a massive political statement but it is just done so well.
Firth does an excellent job of conveying King George VI's fear of public speaking and the humiliation he feels from his inability to adequately express himself.*
Indeed there is one particular scene when, shortly after becoming King, Edward VIII snidely teases his brother's stammer and George or Bertie as he was known by his family, can't verbally fight back, paralised by his speech impediment the pain is written all over his face.
It can't be easy getting an audience to empathise with someone who's had a very privileged life but he does by showing that if you strip away the pomp and ceremony and stiff upper lip there is just a scared man underneath.
And the supporting cast positively glows with star performers. Helena Bonham Carter is back in her natural period drama habitat as the supportive, wifey with a heart. And then there is Derek Jacobi doing a great job of being a slightly pompous Archbishop of Canterbury, Timothy Spall looking very bulldog like as Winston Churchill, Michael Gambon as the bullying King George V.
And of course the lovely Guy Pearce doing a wonderful, clipped upper-crust British accent playing the vain and love-struck Edward who hands the throne over so he can pursue his love, divorcee Wallis Simpson.
The only fly in the ointment is that Pearce just looks wrong as Colin's older brother. He's seven years younger and both actors certainly look their age. It just seemed odd casting.
It is only a little fly though and as it made the cinema erupt into spontaneous applause I'll give it four and a half out of five.
The King's Speech is released in the UK in January, just in time for an Oscar nom or two I should imagine.
* I couldn't help thinking it ironic that Mr Firth most likely had a speech therapist to help him into to the stammer, which could have sounded mimicked but didn't.
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