jrarichards Review of A Royal Night Out

A Royal Night Out (2015)

Gadon "saves" The Queen - as the main reason for seeing this film!

[7/10 · 9 July 2015]

This is "a true story" to the extent that: a) there was a Second World War, b) that War was won by us Brits, c) London and the UK understandably went a bit mad when that victory was secured (notwithstanding some further unpleasant months fighting the Japanese, and otherwise suffering at their hands), d) amidst all the genuine joy and relief there were some around more than happy and ready to make money out of the first moments of peacetime, just as they had profited from the War itself, e) Her Majesty as the then Princess Elizabeth (or "Lilibet", if you will) was a pretty good-looking woman in the early and mid 40s, when she was still under 20 years old, and f) Our Queen – in uniform like so very, very many others – really did mingle with the crowds on VE night. And so to this film, which does a fair job of capturing that night unique in all of history, even though it follows a fantasised story that does what it can to conceal the fact that Princess Margaret was 14 as the War ended, and so largely incapable of the behaviour Bel Powley does her enthusiastic best to portray. This story raises the odd laugh as it descends towards farce or slapstick, hence those laughs will be tempered by feelings of disbelief – and rightly so given non-authentic military (or 1940s) behaviour in a few places. The film also introduces us to characters plausible (Roger Allam good value as often, in this case in a spiv-cum-brothel-keeper role of "Lord Stan") and implausible (the Guards Regiments may have had a chinless wonder and incompetent or two among their officers down the years, but these had been mightily "thinned down" by 1945, let's face it). Ironically, and as surprisingly often seems to happen with films of this kind, characters played roughly speaking as they must have been in real life seem hard to believe – Rupert Everett and Emily Watson just "aren't" King George and our late great Queen Mother, much as we would like them to be so! This is of minor importance, given their brief times on screen – and the King at least is portrayed sympathetically in any case. Far more serious (in my view) is the failure of (Irish) male lead Jack Reynor to generate a fully cohesive, real-life person out of his RAF Corporal character – also called Jack. Ironically, his mother (encountered only briefly) seems truer to life than does her beloved son. Which leaves us with one key character who was able to make or break the film, and in my view does – if only just – "make" it. When Canadian Sarah Gadon first appears on screen one's immediate reaction is – "she looks/is nothing like HMQ". Yet by the time of the film's final close-ups, her beauty and poise really succeed in conjuring up something of that personage so very familiar (yet still unknown) to countless millions of us. In the meantime, Gadon has shown us "a fish out of water gasping for air" more than once in a capital and a country that (we in the audience all know) she will begin reigning over in just 7 short years – and will still be doing that at the moment of our taking seats in the cinema in the entirely different world of June-July 2015! That is such a magical reality – so worthy of disbelief and yet so obviously true – that it would be hard to really mess this role up, admittedly. Nevertheless, Gadon does the job well, making us think about how much Her Majesty has given up and did give up – in order to do the job, reminding us that what we today know as a supremely-dutiful and accomplished statesperson (and an immensely, incredibly resilient woman) was (very) young, very pretty and very socially-awkward once, and did want to kick her heels a bit, even though at every stage her actions were tempered by knowledge of the privilege/lifelong burden that was just around the corner. At several moments we are reminded of these truths with almost painful clarity in the film, which in this way (and thanks primarily to Sarah Gadon) drags itself kicking and screaming out of the real pastiche and failure it might otherwise have been.