alibi_shop (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alibi_shop) wrote2019-09-02 07:23 pm
alibi_shop) wrote2019-09-02 07:23 pm
TV: The Crown, season 2 (Netflix, 2019)
I've never liked reading about or hearing about the British royal family. I do like historical dramas, but they usually work less well for me in TV series form because the longer the story goes on, the harder it is to corral actual history into a narrative shape. Whether The Crown works so well for me just because of the high level of craft in terms of acting and writing and production design, or if there actually is something interesting about the monarchy after all, I'm not sure, but I never would've imagined I'd be so into this.
If you haven't seen any of it, the overall approach is that it starts with Elizabeth Windsor becoming queen at 25 in 1952, and follows her and her husband through the next 12 years (so far) as various historical events occur, some of which are a big deal for England and others only for their own family. Each episode is pretty self-contained and deals with some particular personal or political issue, and time passes in between them without an attempt at smooth continuity; you're not so much immersed in these people's lives as visiting them at intervals. There are two overall themes: the increasing pace of cultural change after World War II, and the extreme strangeness of the whole idea of constitutional monarchy. On the surface this sometimes threatens to take a Downton Abbey approach, i.e. "Our aristocratic traditions may be a bit bizarre and unjust, but they're traditions and they're colorful and it's a shame that The World Is Changing so fast that they'll be lost." But I think Peter Morgan (this is basically the work of a single writer) is sharper than that: he acknowledges that that's how people like to talk about themselves and their institutions, and that sometimes they mean it honestly and other times not, but he doesn't lose sight of the basic fact that this institution serves no real purpose—except inasmuch as legitimizing social hierarchy, and feeding an abstracted form of nationalism that's like a second state religion, are real purposes—and that it isn't really compatible with honesty or justice, partly because by nature it puts image above substance, and partly because the whole ruling class is so emotionally distorted by their privilege. The show's answer to why you should pay any attention to the royal family is that they're the class system in its purest form; when we see various Prime Ministers paying respects to the Crown, it's not just an empty ritual, they're affirming the belief that people like them are what the country is inherently all about.
Elizabeth (Claire Foy) and Philip (Matt Smith) are the heart of the show, and I like that it doesn't try to make either of them either very nice or very consistent. Elizabeth is presented more or less in keeping with her popular image as an admirably independent-minded monarch for the modern age, but Foy's performance isn't a heroic turn: she plays the Queen as a potentially intelligent striver who's severely limited by the social bubble she's grown up in and doesn't really know anything about anything because she's never had to, and there's a weary stiffness that you can see setting in more and more, as if ever since 25 she's been studying full-time how to be 75. Philip is a glib, self-pitying, and unfaithful jerk, but Smith makes it plausible that there was and sort of still is a bond between them and that he takes her strange role as seriously as she does. They're both precise and captivating actors, and the directors use them well, probably helped by the knowledge that the roles will all be recast next year so they'd better take advantage of everything these people are good at.
The biggest differences from the previous season are that Churchill (John Lithgow) is gone—replaced by a series of men who are maybe less self-obsessed and more competent, but very confused about how England should relate to the world at this point—and that Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) gets more attention, still on a similar "true love is impossible due to royal protocol" theme but in a more complicated and interesting way. The episode about her relationship with Tony Armstrong-Jones/Lord Snowdon adds a new kind of uncomfortable energy to the show: they're both trying so hard to be the opposite of the stuffy nobility, and you want to root for them as young bohemians in love (Snowdon's complicated love life is portrayed pretty vividly and it's the first time we've seen anyone enjoying sex), but it becomes clear that they're deeply conventional in their obsession with status and, Queen or no Queen, this can't end well. That comes right after an episode that puts the aristocracy in an even darker light, as everyone who spent season 1 thinking "But Edward turned out to be some kind of Nazi, right? Are they ever going to get into that?" finally gets to see Alex Jennings's entertainingly snotty performance open up and reveal a deep ugliness; after Churchill's departure it had gotten hard to remember but here we're reminded strongly that the war was very recent, and that everyone wasn't necessarily in it together. And in case American viewers are starting to feel too comfortable about having parted ways with these creeps, we then get a Kennedy story with the most unpleasant Kennedy I've ever seen (Billy Graham shows up too, and you can totally see how he inspires admiration and also how he's a sign of dangerous things to come). Then it's Philip's childhood trauma and his own brush with Nazism; then it's the Profumo Affair—the second half of the season is all over the place, with a jittery intensity that I think conveys the idea that the wheels never really did get put back on the 20th century after they fell off, much better than any amount of dialogue saying that.
Just in terms of lovely bits of acting and writing, I don't think anything this year surpassed my favorite part of season 1: the exchanges between Churchill and his portraitist Graham Sutherland (Stephen Dillane, one of my all-time favorite portrayals of a working artist). But it's still awfully good.
If you haven't seen any of it, the overall approach is that it starts with Elizabeth Windsor becoming queen at 25 in 1952, and follows her and her husband through the next 12 years (so far) as various historical events occur, some of which are a big deal for England and others only for their own family. Each episode is pretty self-contained and deals with some particular personal or political issue, and time passes in between them without an attempt at smooth continuity; you're not so much immersed in these people's lives as visiting them at intervals. There are two overall themes: the increasing pace of cultural change after World War II, and the extreme strangeness of the whole idea of constitutional monarchy. On the surface this sometimes threatens to take a Downton Abbey approach, i.e. "Our aristocratic traditions may be a bit bizarre and unjust, but they're traditions and they're colorful and it's a shame that The World Is Changing so fast that they'll be lost." But I think Peter Morgan (this is basically the work of a single writer) is sharper than that: he acknowledges that that's how people like to talk about themselves and their institutions, and that sometimes they mean it honestly and other times not, but he doesn't lose sight of the basic fact that this institution serves no real purpose—except inasmuch as legitimizing social hierarchy, and feeding an abstracted form of nationalism that's like a second state religion, are real purposes—and that it isn't really compatible with honesty or justice, partly because by nature it puts image above substance, and partly because the whole ruling class is so emotionally distorted by their privilege. The show's answer to why you should pay any attention to the royal family is that they're the class system in its purest form; when we see various Prime Ministers paying respects to the Crown, it's not just an empty ritual, they're affirming the belief that people like them are what the country is inherently all about.
Elizabeth (Claire Foy) and Philip (Matt Smith) are the heart of the show, and I like that it doesn't try to make either of them either very nice or very consistent. Elizabeth is presented more or less in keeping with her popular image as an admirably independent-minded monarch for the modern age, but Foy's performance isn't a heroic turn: she plays the Queen as a potentially intelligent striver who's severely limited by the social bubble she's grown up in and doesn't really know anything about anything because she's never had to, and there's a weary stiffness that you can see setting in more and more, as if ever since 25 she's been studying full-time how to be 75. Philip is a glib, self-pitying, and unfaithful jerk, but Smith makes it plausible that there was and sort of still is a bond between them and that he takes her strange role as seriously as she does. They're both precise and captivating actors, and the directors use them well, probably helped by the knowledge that the roles will all be recast next year so they'd better take advantage of everything these people are good at.
The biggest differences from the previous season are that Churchill (John Lithgow) is gone—replaced by a series of men who are maybe less self-obsessed and more competent, but very confused about how England should relate to the world at this point—and that Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) gets more attention, still on a similar "true love is impossible due to royal protocol" theme but in a more complicated and interesting way. The episode about her relationship with Tony Armstrong-Jones/Lord Snowdon adds a new kind of uncomfortable energy to the show: they're both trying so hard to be the opposite of the stuffy nobility, and you want to root for them as young bohemians in love (Snowdon's complicated love life is portrayed pretty vividly and it's the first time we've seen anyone enjoying sex), but it becomes clear that they're deeply conventional in their obsession with status and, Queen or no Queen, this can't end well. That comes right after an episode that puts the aristocracy in an even darker light, as everyone who spent season 1 thinking "But Edward turned out to be some kind of Nazi, right? Are they ever going to get into that?" finally gets to see Alex Jennings's entertainingly snotty performance open up and reveal a deep ugliness; after Churchill's departure it had gotten hard to remember but here we're reminded strongly that the war was very recent, and that everyone wasn't necessarily in it together. And in case American viewers are starting to feel too comfortable about having parted ways with these creeps, we then get a Kennedy story with the most unpleasant Kennedy I've ever seen (Billy Graham shows up too, and you can totally see how he inspires admiration and also how he's a sign of dangerous things to come). Then it's Philip's childhood trauma and his own brush with Nazism; then it's the Profumo Affair—the second half of the season is all over the place, with a jittery intensity that I think conveys the idea that the wheels never really did get put back on the 20th century after they fell off, much better than any amount of dialogue saying that.
Just in terms of lovely bits of acting and writing, I don't think anything this year surpassed my favorite part of season 1: the exchanges between Churchill and his portraitist Graham Sutherland (Stephen Dillane, one of my all-time favorite portrayals of a working artist). But it's still awfully good.