[ad_1]
It may undercut the moment for some viewers when Staunton then delivers a speech whose text has been available to read, word for word, on the royal family’s website for years.
The care that “The Crown” takes in retelling 20th-century British history has long been one of its strengths. But in the first episodes of its final season, as its timeline finally rolls into a fateful stretch of 1997 that many viewers already remember with grim, intense clarity, the show seems more inconveniently beholden to history — perhaps even burdened by it — than ever before.
The beats of the story told in these episodes are so TV famous, the images so recently and vividly seared into the collective memory, that the show’s window of artistic license seems to winnow ever narrower, leaving it little choice but to meticulously re-create them. So it’s in the private chambers just on the outskirts of the well-known story — settings where the public record had no business being or going at the time — where this four-episode arc of “The Crown” does its most interesting work.
Season 6, which has six more episodes coming Dec. 14, opens in the summer of 1997 with several key players doing their best to move forward with dignity after the messy separation and divorce that marred the ’90s for the monarchy. Prince Charles (a dynamic Dominic West), now enjoying his hard-won happily ever after with Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams), plays nice with his sons’ mother, earnestly commending her charity work and devotion to motherhood. Elizabeth, meanwhile, reluctantly extends a hand of acceptance toward Camilla and thus modernity. Diana (Elizabeth Debicki), love-starved and feisty as ever, nevertheless puts on a brave face for the sake of Princes William and Harry (Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards, respectively), who make an effort to be good sports even as paparazzi swarm them relentlessly and their parents’ new paramours invade their lives.
The show’s costume and set designers dazzle with their ability to whip up imagery instantly recognizable from paparazzi photos and posthumous hagiography: the neon-green swim ensemble Diana famously wore on vacation with her sons and her new love interest, Dodi Fayed, in St. Tropez; the Repossi engagement ring Fayed purchased for Diana in Paris; Diana in a gray suit in the service elevator at the Ritz hotel; Diana in the black blazer, white pants and gold earrings she wore for dinner the night of the accident; the ambulances in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel; William and Harry walking in a loose, slow W formation alongside Charles, Prince Philip and Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, behind her casket during the funeral procession.
Peter Morgan’s script handles the pressure to be authoritative only slightly less gracefully. Sure, a monologue from Diana about her charity work with land-mine survivors slows down the show’s deliberate march toward the inevitable. But a conversation between Fayed and Diana on vacation manages to include a succinct and relatively unobtrusive explanation of the lawsuit Fayed’s ex-fiancée has filed against him in the wake of their engagement’s dissolution.
Given these faithful, careful representations, it’s surprising when “The Crown” imbues the most infamous event in its historical purview with a wholly invented circumstance. (Spoilers to come.) As they did in real life, Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) and Diana spend a few unexpected hours in their hotel suite at the Ritz in Paris after photographers and onlookers ruin their dinner plans. In the show’s version of events, Fayed uses that time to propose to Diana, an offer she gently turns down. An honest, affectionate conversation ensues, in which both parties acknowledge that the person who most wants them to marry is Fayed’s father. They decide together to make serious changes in their lives, for the better, as soon as they’re home from Paris the next day.
It’s even stranger when, in the hours after her death, Diana visits Prince Charles and later the queen in their quiet, solitary hours as figments of their imaginations. She comforts Charles and nudges Elizabeth toward responding to the grief-stricken British public in the way Diana herself might. Fayed appears, similarly, to comfort and reckon with his father.
Stranger still, it all works. “The Crown” takes a risk in imagining Diana and Fayed’s final interactions in that hotel room, and it pays off with a satisfying, devastating narrative about adults doing their best to finally grow up, to get a handle on their chaotic lives and their worst tendencies, just before everything spins tragically out of control.
And the queen’s speech, comforting the nation after the loss of the People’s Princess? There’s simply no way to know whether the real Elizabeth felt guided or guilted by Diana into making such a gesture — and it’s jarring, yes, to see Debicki’s Diana pop back on-screen so casually after her dramatic demise.
But the visit certainly raises the stakes — and makes for better television — moments later, when the show’s Elizabeth utters the same words the real queen did, acknowledging her less-than-beloved daughter-in-law’s wisdom and humanity before Britain and the world: “I admired and respected her.”
The Crown (10 episodes) returns Thursday on Netflix with four episodes. The remaining six will stream Dec. 14.
[ad_2]
Source link
