The Queen speculates on British aristocracy

The Queen opens with Helen Mirren's face -- a half-smile, a slight crease of an upturned cheek, an eyebrow arched --- and spends much of its run time returning there, mining her taut, sometimes imperceptible expressions; mining, as it were, a glacier for heat. That the camera spends time on Mirren's Queen Elizabeth is no accident. It seems that in the days following Princess Diana's death, everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the face that came to represent the British monarchy, if only to watch it crumble. Stephen Frear's newest film documents the slow unraveling of the British royal family -- anachronistic, rigid, yet consumed by honor -- in the days after the "People's Princess" was killed in Paris, doing so with a deft hand, the same touch he brought to the world of illegal immigration in 2002's Dirty Pretty Things and, most famously, to the neuroses of John Cusack's Rob Gordon in 2000's High Fidelity.

Mirren's Elizabeth, like Philip Seymour Hoffman's Capote of last year, is not an actor's trick of memorizing tics and accents or hiding behind prosthetics and a good wig, though she admittedly looks the part. Rather, it is the kind of performance that calls upon an actor's intelligence to continue beyond where a script stops, the kind of performance critics often label Oscar-worthy, and for good reason. Mirren has always been a versatile and challenging performer. Her most recent role was that of a British hit-woman sleeping with Cuba Gooding Jr. in Shadowboxer. In an about-face performance, her Elizabeth is someone trapped behind glass: eyes are always on her, but flesh-to-flesh connection, is impossible. Instead, she chooses to do what she does best. "I thought the British people wanted a queen," she says late in the film, and her choices, born of surviving World War II and encouraged by a sense of duty forged by a 1,000-year lineage, put her at odds with the modernity that Diana could harness best.

The Princess of Wales, for her part, is seen only through archival news footage -- a glowing pixyish figure preternaturally gifted in interviews and relations with "her people" of Britain -- but, draped by flags and lying in state, she is the divisive engine of the film. On the one side sit the royals, Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms), while on the other sets everyone else, from a newly elected Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) on downward. Diana bridged these worlds the best, and for that, she gained the trust of the people and the backward glances of the royalty. The reactions of the royal family to her death range from dysfunctional to nearly alien, captured in a quiet vignette when Phillip, Elizabeth's husband, suggests a hunting trip -- a "stalking" in the hills of Scotland -- to take Diana's orphaned sons away from the frenzy of London. The irony hangs in the air: Hunting of a different kind directly killed their mother, and Phillip seems to only see an opportunity to bag a "14 point stag." Even Prince Charles (Alex Jennings) shakes and convulses, desperate to be a modern man and speak to the public, convinced that he will be assassinated for his rocky past with Diana.

As the film continues and the disillusionment of the British people grows to a fever pitch, Blair's popularity soars and he begins to push back at the urging of his irreverent wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), whose curtsy for the Queen is deemed "dangerously low." The scenes with Blair are striking, mainly because they show a charmer with a "Cheshire Cat smile" who develops a genuine fondness for the aloof Elizabeth, in contrast to the exhausted, gaunt Prime Minister who currently resides in 10 Downing St., worn brittle by his support for the Iraq War. Even Blair's Machiavellian communications director Alastair Campbell (Mark Bazeley), who resigned in disgrace after the revelation of reports showing he doctored intelligence in the lead-up to the war, makes a strong appearance, his speech-writing a necessary evil in a world of spin and hype. Frears is above making overtly political points with his film -- he is too evenhanded in his treatment of the players for that -- but Mirren all but gives a knowing wink when she says to Blair, "You wake up and the world has turned against you. One day it will happen to you too." This is one of the messages of this even-keeled but determined little film: without innovation, without flexibility, we all stagnate, and we all lose.