Pun Salad

We're slowly working our way through last year's "must-see" movies, but I was a little trepidatious about this one. As just about everyone knows, it's the story of the reaction of England and its royal family to the 1997 death of Princess Di. And I couldn't see any way that a red-white-and-blue-blooded Yank like me could find that interesting.

But Mrs. Salad wanted to see it.

Well, more fool I. Helen Mirren won an Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth II, and I don't think an Oscar was ever more richly deserved. She's onscreen for most of the movie, and I had a tough time looking away. The real Queen wouldn't have been as good here.

And, to its credit, the movie doesn't take the easy way out. Yes, both Princes Charles and Philip are portrayed as IQ-85 twits. But Tony Blair's wife, Cherie, and a number of Tony's buddies come off poorly as well—for being tediously convinced of their intellectual progressive superiority over hidebound concepts such as tradition and duty. You don't see that kind of careful characterization in support of a movie's themes very often, let alone done well.

The movie makes clear that Queen E's a pretty tough and down-to-earth admirable old bird, driving her own car when given a chance. Her flaw, such as it was, was failure to understand and adapt quickly to a massive media-driven frenzy of sentimentality. She comes away not defeated, but smarter and stronger.