"The Queen" movie, or, how subservient is Tony Blair?

I just saw the movie "The Queen". I thought it was entertaining, not least because it shows what a weenie Tony Blair is.

The story of the movie is the interaction between Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair over the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. We see Blair, the middle-class regular guy, start out skeptical about the royal family's pretensions and their tone-deafness to public opinion.

By the end, Tony Blair has become the Queen's faithful puppy. The final scene even shows Blair and the Queen stolling with three or four of her canine dogs. The dramatic climax comes when a normally calm Tony Blair goes ballistic when his former top political adviser, Alistair Campbell, refers to the Queen as "the old bat".

The story is a bit slow. And the portrayals of the stiff royals contrasting to the in-touch-with-the-common-people Tony Blair are overdrawn to the point of melodrama. But it's often entertaining, and I found plenty of laugh lines.

There's even a sly reference to the fact that the Windsors are actually part of the German House of Saxony-Anhalt. Prince Philip asks in a moment of sneering at the unwashed masses who are making demands on the royal house, what's next, will they be asked to change their names to "Hilde and Hector"? Critics of the existence of the monarchy have bee known to demonstrate with slogans like, "Out with the Germans!"

Prince Charles comes off as relatively sympathetic. I think it's intended for Blair to come off as particularly impressive. But the actor who portrays him got his actual attitude down so well, completely with the dorky smile plastered on his face, that it looks obvious why Blair would eventually wind up snivelling at George Bush's feet. God save the Queen, God save the Emperor!

The thing I kept thinking as Blair kissed up to the Queen more and more was, this guy is theoretically the leader of Britain's socialist party. And he's totally focused on saving the royal house from their own shortcomings.

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