Directed by Tom Hooper. Starring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Ehle, Eve Best, Freya Wilson, Claire Bloom, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Andrews, Michael Gambon 12A cert, gen release, 118 min

For an unabashedly Oscar-bait Britflick, The King's Speechis a surprisingly subtle and penetrating drama, writes Donald Clarke

EVEN BEFORE Tom Hooper’s awards magnet got fully airborne, angry murmurs were becoming audible in the critical undergrowth. The hype has been deafening. But many liberal sourpusses – you know, those London-types – have wondered whether this is what British cinema should be about.

The King's Speechfollows George VI, King of England during the second World War, as, flung into the job following his brother's abdication, he attempts to overcome a crippling speech impediment. Colin Firth plays the King. Helena Bonham Carter plays the Queen Mother (as she then wasn't). Various theatrical dames and knights mop up the remaining courtiers and clerics.

Here's the thing. Should the British worry that, on paper, at least, The King's Speech comes across as an Oscar-hungry, overly cosy slice of heritage cinema? Should they fret that, to quote Jason Solomons of the Observer,it "gives the Yanks what they want"?

Probably not. For a start, the film exhibits a little (just a little, mind) more guts than that summary suggests. Firth does not give us a clubbable, warm-hearted man of the people. Irascible, largely humourless, not enormously bright, this George VI will do little to disabuse Windsorphobes of their impression that cold blue blood runs through the family’s veins.

Offering another touching, furrowed performance, Firth makes it clear that the king (known as Bertie to his intimates) is very much a victim of his own birth. In one particularly moving sequence, while musing upon the misery of his circumstances, he is allowed to finish the construction of a child’s model aircraft. Maybe if he’d had a less rarefied upbringing, Bertie might have grown up into a perfectly happy, contentedly fluent tobacconist or railway porter.

So, for all its fusty throwbacks, Hooper’s picture does exhibit real psychological insight. It also has a powerful personal drama at its heart.

Enjoying its status as an anti- Pygmalion, the film begins with the hero, then still the Duke of York, becoming excruciatingly tongue-tied while addressing an audience at Wembley Stadium. His jolly, unpretentious, wife – in a superb comic turn, Bonham Carter makes a Wodehouse aunt of Elizabeth – scours Harley Street in search of speech therapists, but encounters only quacks, bullies and blowhards.

The crisis becomes more severe when Edward VIII (a slightly shaky Guy Pearce), the Duke’s dissolute older brother, makes it clear that he has no intention of disowning Mrs Simpson (Eve Best), his divorced mistress, thus opening up the possibility that Bertie might become king.

Eventually, Elizabeth happens upon an Australian luvvie named Lionel Logue. Granted wit and warmth by an unusually restrained Geoffrey Rush, the former actor – operating from a distressed studio that looks like the set for a production of Beckett’s Endgame – dares to investigate the psychological causes of Bertie’s linguistic paralysis.

David Seidler's script cunningly permits great events such as the abdication and the coming of war to unfold in the wings while the protagonist's personal crisis occupies centre stage. As a result, one feels oneself gently eased through history, rather than (as is often the case in such things) being dragged past a cinematic diorama. Utilising wide lenses and looming camera angles, Hooper, director of The Damned United,never forgets that, unlike the overly televisual The Queen,his film's primary home in on the big screen.

It is a shame that, at certain points, the casting decisions jar with reality. One can live with the fact that Firth (broad, healthy, soft at the edges) could not look less like George VI (thin, bird-like, angular). It’s harder to get past the fact that Edward VIII, supposedly his elder brother, looks significantly younger. Firth is, indeed, 50 and Pearce is 43.

Still, these are minor quibbles. Travel without prejudice and you will enjoy a moving, impeccably acted and surprisingly funny slice of comfort food. There are worse ways of starting an unpromising looking year.