2023-12-19 18:03:47
by Elisa Messina
The famous series on the history of the royal family concludes with the last 5 episodes. And the attention returns to Queen Elizabeth with an ending that is a loving tribute to the deceased sovereign. And not only
With the release of the final six episodes of the sixth season on Netflix, the colossal TV series «The Crown» has definitively ended. After seven years, 60 episodes, the curtain closes in 2005, with an eighty-year-old Queen Elizabeth dealing with the marriage of her son Charles to Camilla. But despite the 143 awards won, will she have managed to recover some of the reputation lost with the last two weak seasons? A decline that seemed even more accentuated after seeing the first four episodes of season 6, those dedicated to the death of Lady D, where the obvious discrepancy from historical facts was not compensated by a captivating narrative ability.
Well, we can say that the ending went better, with ups and downs. Peter Morgan, the author of the successful drama, has decided to return to focus all the attention on the personality of Queen Elizabeth, the true and only common thread of all the seasons and to design a season finale which is a loving tribute to the queen disappearance but also the seal on a very seductive way of telling the story of the woman behind the queen.
Indeed, not one, but three queens. Because Morgan brings the other two Elizabeths back on stage, the young girl played by Claire Foy, the mature one, who has the face of Olivia Colman in a crucial moment of the season: they have to dialogue with an eighty-year-old Elizabeth/Imelda Staunton seriously tempted by the desire to abdicate in favor of her son: Lilibet is alone, the people in the family who knew her best, who more than the others knew how to interpret her thoughts, that is, her mother and her sister, died two months apart. She therefore can only question herself to find the right answer for her future and, consequently, for that of the Crown. The internal torment becomes conversation now with one, now with the other, between the stables and corridors of Windsor Castle. Definitely one of the most beautiful scenes of the entire season, and perhaps of the entire series.
However, the episodes dedicated to William and the beginning of his love story with Kate on the university campus are truly disappointing: they seem like a young adult film, a romantic comedy, from which we only learn that the future Princess of Wales is a ambitious girl and her mother, Carol Middleton, a cunning manipulator. The story of the adolescent hardships of Princes William and Harry is also disappointing: the acute torment of the boys after the death of their mother within a family incapable of expressing feelings is not captured. If Morgan had read the book written by Harry, «Spare» (which he refused to do) he would have found very interesting intimate anecdotes in it. It must be said that it was not easy to tell stories that had already been told a thousand times in news and gossip.
But Peter Morgan returns to do, in the finale, what he does best: taking the historical character of the queen and trying to tell, with a good dose of fiction, Lilibet behind Elizabeth, scrutinizing her emotions, her thoughts. The more enigmatic a character appears, the more seductive it is for a screenwriter to invent an “alternative” face behind the sphinx. Did Elizabeth really dislike Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair? Was your favorite prime minister really Harold Winsor? Did you really have a secret love, Porchie, never consummated? Did you really go wild swinging with black American soldiers in the underground club of the Ritz when you were 18?
Morgan and his writing staff continued this game for all 60 episodes with invented situations or dialogues. I think, for example, of a memorable dialogue (Season III) between Elizabeth/Olivia Colmann and Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the aftermath of the royal visit to the village of Aberfan, in Wales, where a landslide swept away and killed 116 children: she confesses to him that she was unable to demonstrate compassion as she would have liked: «I pretended to dry the tears. Because I can’t cry. I’ve known for a long time that there’s something wrong with me, something missing.” Applause.
But after all, hadn’t the skilled Morgan created something similar fifteen years ago in the film “The Queen”? When Helen Mirren / Elizabeth, anguished over what to do after Diana’s death, wanders the Scottish moors behind the wheel of her Land Rover until she comes across a beautiful deer and decides to save it from hunters… Just her.
This time, in the final episode, we even imagine (spoiler alert!) Elizabeth writing her abdication speech with the intention of reading it in front of her totally unaware family during Charles and Camilla’s wedding party. Her torment has been tormenting her for some time: «And the life I put aside? The woman I cast aside when I became queen?” she wonders with red eyes the eighty-year-old sovereign who now watches with nostalgia the films of her carefree youth and sees herself unfit to carry on a monarchy in decline. «But what kind of question is this – the other queen answers her, the young one from the coronation – now only Elizabeth exists, Queen Elizabeth».
Thus the passage of the speech on the renunciation of the throne will be deleted by Elizabeth/Imelda with the red pen just a few moments before the wedding reception and only a very attentive grandson Harry will notice that while the grandmother was reading she skipped a piece of paper, “that” piece of paper. In the end «The Crown» must be faithful to its mission and to the story: it was not possible, as Alan Bennet did in the very pleasant novel «The Sovereign Reader», to take the game of make-believe to the extreme and make her decide to give up everything seriously. However, the game served to convey a more human and passionate image of Elizabeth.
“You are inimitable” Philip will tell her inside the Windsor chapel, in the exact spot where the two royals are buried today. «When you and I are no longer here everyone will carry on pretending that everything is fine but the party is over». Did the British monarchy really end with Elizabeth? Certainly the anachronism of the institution seems more evident and in any case nothing could have been as before without the charisma of Elizabeth II. The charisma of a mysterious personality.
As Stephen Bates, who for years was the newspaper’s royal correspondent, concluded in the “Guardian”, “The Crown” recounted 60 years of events and scandals, brought to light human weaknesses while remaining a refined, well-acted soap opera. In the sense that he never seriously put the Crown in a bad light or focused the spotlight on its aspects that were really criticized and criticizable within British society: privileges, wealth, properties. «The Crown» was refined and enjoyable entertainment. Which every now and then made us believe that we could truly know the thoughts and emotions of the most inscrutable figure of the 20th century.
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December 19, 2023 (changed December 19, 2023 | 5:45 pm)
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