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the note than he, in the way of serials,
gets blown up by the I.R.A., while out
in his boat trapping lobsters.
A
lot of “The Crown” is shot in closeup,
or medium closeup, and it’s a canny
choice, given that everything takes place
in a closed-off world of closed-off emo-
tions. You feel the grief when the Queen
and her family receive the news of
Mountbatten’s death, but it’s because of
what they don’t or can’t articulate during
a brutal time. You have to read their
thoughts—the flickering hurt, the mirth,
the dull incomprehension, the anger—
because rarely does their spoken language
approximate what you can see them ex-
periencing. Morgan takes the Windsors’
collective repression and makes it a style.
Of the younger actors, O’Connor is
especially adept at conveying physical
discomfort and rage. With his shoulders
hunched and his hands buried in his jacket
pockets, O’Connor’s Prince Charles seems
to have been made smug by martyrdom;
it’s a martyrdom that grows more shrill
and anguished after he meets Lady Diana
Spencer (Emma Corrin) and, eventually,
marries her. Charles does so out of duty,
rather than love; like a closeted gay man
who marries a woman for social accept-
ability and advancement, Charles turns
Diana into his beard. Diana, however,
who fantasizes about a perfect romantic
union with a fairy-tale prince, wants more,
dreams of more, as she roller-skates
around desolate Kensington Palace, boo-
gying to Duran Duran. (This is a great
touch, the kind of thing you might see
on “The Windsors,” a hilarious parody
of life as a royal, also on Netflix.) Inevi-
tably, the more Charles withholds love
and attention, the more desperate Diana
becomes for his approval, for control over
her marriage. Her loneliness is a wound
that Charles finds distasteful and longs
to separate himself from, but he can’t: he
must live in service to the crown. Their
scenes together in enclosed spaces—in a
car, on a plane—work particularly well,
because the actors’ movement is limited
and they must depend on their faces and
their voices to convey the odd moments
of joy or dismay. (It’s important to re-
member that both Charles and Diana
had an interest in amateur theatrics; as a
young man, the Prince wanted to be an
actor, while Diana loved to dance.)
I don’t envy any actress trying to im-
personate Diana, who, in some ways, re-
mains the most relatable, and thus the
most popular, English royal. Even with
the enormous sympathy that Corrin
evinces, especially when it comes to Di-
ana’s bulimia and her struggle to be seen,
she can’t quite find a center to the role.
She seems disembodied somehow. She
doesn’t so much convey Diana’s fears as
express her fear of playing Diana. Cor-
rin’s Princess stands over there, while the
actress stands over here, and we have to
bridge the distance with our own feel-
ings and memories.
Tom Burke, who plays Dazzle Jen-
nings, a friend of Princess Margaret’s,
doesn’t have the weight of all that history
to contend with, but his acting is so far
superior to that of some of the other play-
ers that he raises the bar on truthfulness
in performance. By the time he appears—
it’s the mid-eighties—Margaret (Helena
Bonham Carter) has been made puffy
by booze, indolence, and willfulness. She’s
an inconsolable royal who, like Charles
and Diana, loves to perform. Gumming
up her potty mouth with red lipstick,
Margaret waits for Dazzle. When we see
him, it’s in medium long shot, and from
Margaret’s point of view; without saying
a word, he fills the frame with vibrancy
and perversion, snaking his way toward
Margaret as David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”
plays in her sitting room. Dazzle and
Margaret, as they prance around, look
like babies in evening dress; champagne
is their milk. They’re a couple who don’t
want the party to end. What would they
do if it did? When the music stops, the
Princess leans over to kiss Dazzle, who
raises his hand to block her from doing
so. The camera pauses on Burke’s face,
and you can see what his character feels in
that moment: a mixture of sadness, pity,
and curiosity. It’s this quality—this ability
to physically manifest imagination—that
makes Burke, to my mind, one of the fin-
est actors of his generation. (He exercised
a similar precision and perverse under-
standing of discomfort in Joanna Hogg’s
2019 film, “The Souvenir.”) Watching
Burke—who ups Bonham Carter’s game,
too—can break your heart, because this
is not acting; it is being.
Colman’s characterization of the Queen
is also less a performance than a refraction
of reality. Each character in “The Crown”
has a history, and Colman drapes herself
in the Queen’s, as if in an ermine cape,and revels in it. There is a shattering scene
in the fourth episode when the Queen is
talking to Prince Philip about her failure
to become the mother she wanted to be.
She says that when her children were
young she vowed that she would not have
the nanny bathe them. And yet, when
the time came and she tried to do it, she
couldn’t. She can love only at a distance
because she has been loved only at a dis-
tance. It’s in moments like this one that
Morgan’s writing rises to the level of Col-
man’s performance, and his words sup-
port her vision of the Queen as a woman
who lives in a world she didn’t make but
has sworn to uphold, even if that means
remaining silent, at least for a time, on
the horror of colonialism, the horror of
apartheid in South Africa, the horror of
Britain’s oppression of Ireland, the hor-
ror of the recession under Thatcher’s con-
servative watch. It takes a great actress to
make us feel that these horrors—very real
ones that have scarred and disfigured
many over the years—are part of Queen
Elizabeth’s largely unspoken backstory.
Colman brings them to the surface as
subtly as she steers Morgan’s script away
from the girl-fight clichés of Elizabeth
butting heads with Thatcher or Diana.
She deals with these scenes with reason
and, sometimes, controlled passion, but
never melodrama, because that is not the
person she is playing. Colman wants us
to know that her interpretation of the
Queen is hers, and also not hers: she is
there to embody a living myth, and it is
her job to show how that body responds
when distressed or trying to express affec-
tion or disconcerted by the way the next
generation wrestles with the problems of
being in love and in trouble.
Honest and unhampered by affec-
tation, Colman, the most humble of
stars, shows us how little Elizabeth knows
and how much she needs to know in
her changing world. At one of the fam-
ily gatherings, Thatcher, the daughter
of a greengrocer, is clearly uncomfort-
able as the royals try to convince her to
join in the drinking game Ibble Dibble,
which involves blackening one’s face
with a burned cork. Watching Colman
and the brilliant Marion Bailey, who
plays the Queen Mother, as they attempt
to jolly Thatcher along, their faces striped
with soot, I was stunned by what the
royals didn’t see in their game, blinded
myself by the truth of their blindness.