The Queen: Academy Award Winning Portrayal of Elizabeth II

The Queen can be read as a historical parable, a morality tale, or a clever take on how bundled in a privileged cocoon the British Royal Family is. If you've read the biographies of Lady Diana and the stories of her "reign", you know quite a bit about the way the Queen and Buckingham Palace handled the entire marriage and divorce. (Badly).

Queen Elizabeth is a diamond, hardened by paternal bereavement, wartime experience, seven or eight party changeovers, four children, and the Abdication (see The Total Collapse of British Royal Family circa 1944). But she is flawed, and the Queen tells of one of these flaws, her limited perception, and the consequences of her actions that come back to bite her in the proverbial backside.

Tony Blair is revealed as not only Modern and pro-Labor elected Prime Minister but also a closet courtier who yearns for his sovereign to wake up and smell the coffee. For Tony Blair and Elizabeth II, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But instead of a brand new Modern revolution, his biggest ally, the Crown, turns silent partner and starts screwing up his polls before he's made his opening speech.

Diana, Princess of Wales, has been killed in a sudden car crash. Elizabeth decided that stag hunting and life as usual suits the Princes, as long as the newspapers and the radio can be kept from them. I've always wondered if in 50 years one of the princes will tell of both of them trying desperately to get news of their mother, while the entire world was gorging on it. The snarky remarks the rest of the family make must have been overheard over the years.

Queen Elizabeth spends a lot of time forthrightly announcing how the people and others have committed grave sins of mistaken thinking, unenlightened conclusions, and imperfect judgment. She seems to not ever have known that the Diana saga was so closely followed complete strangers on a train could dissect every aspect of all the events, include the tampon phone calls and the squidgy tapes, for hours.