October 2, 2006
The Queen Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:00 AM EST The superb new movie The Queen, elevated to the level of brilliance by the subtle, multifaceted performance of Helen Mirren, has got me thinking about historical fiction on the screen. (I am always thinking about historical fiction on the page.) While the movie is not about American history—the only moments of Americana in it are a television clip of President Clinton making a statement after the death of Princess Diana and of various American celebrities attending her funeral—the film’s use of fiction to explore recent British events stands in stark contrast to ABC’s miniseries The Path to 9/11.
In The Queen, Stephen Frears views the enormous and, to the British royal family, shocking and unanticipated explosion of public grief after the death of Diana through the prism of Queen Elizabeth’s feelings and interaction with the then-just-elected prime minister, Tony Blair. The conversations between the queen and Blair, and between the queen and members of her family, are, of course, imagined. I am not a royal-follower and have no idea how closely they adhere to fact, nor, I imagine, do even royal-followers. I would be delighted to discover that the queen has such a sharp wit, and that her husband calls her “Cabbage” as he kisses her good night. But the important point is that the characterizations and dialogue are credible as far as what is on record. The portraits of the queen and Blair are sympathetic, but they do not seem wildly off the mark.
Contrast this with The Path to 9/11. Before ABC aired the series, the network made much of the fact that former New Jersey Governor Thomas Keane, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had vetted it. Only when members of the Clinton administration began to protest that the movie, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred,” did ABC begin to emphasize the fictional aspect of the program. One fabrication Ms. Albright objected to was a scene that shows her refusing to support a cruise missile strike against bin Laden without first alerting the Pakistani government. But perhaps the most egregious misrepresentation is a scene that shows former national security adviser Samuel R. Berger slamming down the phone on a CIA officer in a fit of pique and thus forfeiting a chance to get bin Laden. The writer and one of the producers of the miniseries admitted the moment had been improvised by an actor and kept in because it seemed to work so well dramatically.
The Queen illustrates and illuminates the place and problem of the monarchy in contemporary Great Britain without grossly misrepresenting the facts as we know them. The Path to 9/11 plays fast and loose with what we do know to sex up a horrific moment in our recent past, or perhaps only to score political points.
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