Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

It's well worth seeing. Not only is Firth brilliant in it, playing a man who comes close to breaking your heart at times, being so brave and retaining the capacity to love in spite of everything that had happened to destroy his self-confidence and generally f--- him up from an early age, but there are gripping performances from all the supporting cast.

At the top of the list there's Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue the speech therapist and Helena Bonham Carter as the down-to-earth, unfashionable, but unfailingly supportive wife and future Queen Mother. I've never liked the characters played by either Rush or Bonham Carter nearly so well in any of the other films I've seen them in.

Then there's Guy Pearce as the spoiled, insensitive elder brother David who ends up abdicating, Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Derek Jacobi as a very officious Archbishop, and little ironic touches like Anthony Andrews (who played the Guy Pearce role of the abdicating Prince of Wales 22 years ago in a TV movie version (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096460/) of his love affair with Wallis Simpson) as the P.M. who most vocally disapproves of the monarch's desire to marry a twice-divorced American commoner.

Colin Firth is brilliant in it, playing a man who comes close to breaking your heart at times, being so brave and retaining the capacity to love in spite of everything that had happened to destroy his self-confidence and generally f--- him up from an early age.

If you saw the movie "The Queen", there's a line spoken by Michael Sheen as P.M. Tony Blair, to the effect that Queen Elizabeth was doing a job (as monarch) that she'd never wanted and which she'd seen kill her father. That adds an extra element of tragic heroism to Firth's character in "The King's Speech", knowing that he rose to the occasion and got his country through WWII, but at a heavy cost to his own health and life expectancy.