A revealing, witty portrait of the British royal family in crisis immediately following the death of Princess Diana. The setting for this fictional account of real events is no less than the private chambers of the Royal Family and the British government in the wake of the sudden death of Princess Diana in August of 1997. In the immediate aftermath of the Princess's passing, the tightly contained, tradition-bound world of the Queen of England clashes with the slick modernity of the country's brand new, image-conscious Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The result is an intimate, yet thematically epic, battle between private and public, responsibility and emotion, custom and action - as a grieving nation waits to see what its leaders will do.

I remember when Princess Diana died and my reactions to her death was similar to my reactions watching the Queen. It was like an outsider looking in on a world I didn't entirely understand nor fully comprehend. I felt sadness that she had died and I felt some outrage for the fact that it was caused my over zealous paparazi but I wasn't fully and emotionally envolved with the event like many of those in Britain were. I couldn't see myself taking flowers down to Buckingham Palace and weeping and lamenting over someone I had never known. That's why watching the Queen was like my reaction to the death of Diana, I am not emotionally invested into the story, I am still the outsider looking in at world that is not mine nor will it ever be. So while there has been nothing but rave reviews for the Queen, my thoughts of the movie is more aloof as one who enjoyed the movie and found it ok but no someone who was overwhelmed by it.

The story is intersting and one I have to admit that I had not known that much about prior to seeing the movie. The film deals with the Queen and the royal reaction to the death of a fromer princess one that had basically but the hand that had fed it and had ended in an ugly divorce. The Queen does not feel the same affection for Diana that most of her subjects did and she is from a different world that dealt with such issues with quite dignity and now finds herself in the crosshairs of her subjects because they cannot accept that quite dignity or that aloofness from someone they feel should be mourning as much as they are. I felt like the Queen myself while watching the film, I am not tearing my hair out with grief and to me the events passed with a feeling of sadness at the tragedy much like the Queen probably wished she could react to the events.

Helen Mirren does a great job but again it wasn't a perfomance that I found myself blown away by unlike all the rave reviewers. She has this quite aloofness that she pulls of well but she is foreign to me like the movie itself. Michael Sheen is the one who moved me as the newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair who finds himself having to straddle both worlds, the queens as well as her more modern subjects wgho are effected by Diana's deaths. So for the movie for me was ok but it was foreign, it was not the movie performance that I had expected and was just ok for me.

Grade: B