You don’t have to be a royal watcher—I’m not—to find the fourth season of “The Crown” (on Netflix) compelling. It’s not that it isn’t fun to watch royal infidelity, sibling rivalry, emotional breakdowns, political friction, misbegotten romances, and dog mania play out against backgrounds that include Buckingham Palace and various grand country estates. But the point here is that, just as you begin to luxuriate in the lurid gossip behind the façade of tradition, wealth, and fading glory, Peter Morgan, the show’s creator and writer, pulls back the brocade curtain and introduces a reality that feels more like yours than not. These wrinkles of truth—a mouse trotting unnoticed across the Queen Mother’s floor while she waits for a call, guards fucking around and ignoring the security cameras during shift changes, a princess vomiting into a toilet again and again—are blemishes on a vast and decaying body; Morgan wants to show not only how the Empire has crumbled but its descent into a kind of domestic crumminess.
In an episode based on an incident that took place in 1982—the season covers the years 1979 to 1990—a young man named Michael Fagan (exceptionally well played by Tom Brooke) breaks into Buckingham Palace and holds the Queen (Olivia Colman) hostage in her bedchamber for about ten minutes. Unhinged, lonely, poor, and desperate for an audience, Fagan wants someone to hear his side of things: Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) has made life worse for men like him—out-of-work blokes who can’t get a leg up, can’t get a decent wage, let alone mental-health care. Added to all that frustration, there is his disappointment with the palace itself. How could a world we associate with power and glamour be so worn and chipped, so frowsy? “The Crown” is replete with letdowns. Long-held beliefs and hopes crash and burn, then crash and burn again, as reality intrudes.
The ten-episode season opens with well-edited shots of the Queen in full military regalia, sitting straight-backed on a horse, saluting her troops. It’s an official occasion, and members of her immediate family are present. The scene is crosscut with period documentary footage of crowds in Northern Ireland protesting British rule—which makes clear Morgan’s interest in what happens when you juxtapose an interpretation of fact with the facts themselves, when you plop your imagination down into the middle of the real. It’s rare that this sort of juxtaposing is as good as it is in “The Crown”—I’m thinking of recent disappointments such as Hulu’s “The Great,” about Catherine the Great, and Netflix’s “Self-Made,” about the Black American businesswoman Madam C. J. Walker. While “The Great” and “Self-Made” play with history, or make a play of history, their conceits are postmodern and glib (especially when it comes to character), allergic to both sentiment and depth. Morgan’s characters, by contrast, live with history, and it’s a shock sometimes, while watching “The Crown,” to realize the extent to which we are all history’s subjects, as vulnerable to its whims as we are to those of family.
Still, the Troubles seem far away, in another place altogether, when we find the aging Lord Louis Mountbatten (Charles Dance) in his summer residence, Classiebawn Castle, in northwest Ireland. It’s 1979. A cousin of the Queen’s, Mountbatten (nicknamed Dickie) was also something of a surrogate father to Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies), who was essentially orphaned as a child, and whose background Morgan featured in Seasons 2 and 3. Now Mountbatten—a military strategist who was much admired by Winston Churchill, and who served as India’s pre-independence viceroy—is turning his attention to Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor). Dickie is pissed off. Charles, instead of finding a wife who will supply him with an heir, has fallen in love with a married woman, Camilla Parker Bowles (the wonderfully suggestive Emerald Fennell). Charles and Camilla first met around 1971, and sometime after that began their on-again, off-again relationship, which, by the dawn of the go-go eighties, made up Charles’s entire erotic and emotional universe. The royal heart wants what it wants, but none of this sits well with Mountbatten, and he writes Charles a note to say so: Doesn’t the Prince realize the grave moral responsibility of being the future King? He must grow up and assume the duty he was born into—upholding and preserving the monarchy. These directives, of course, don’t acknowledge how society has progressed or how a young man like Charles has progressed with it. He’s caught between Empire Dying and Empire Dead. No sooner does Mountbatten fire off the note than he, in the way of serials, gets blown up by the I.R.A., while out in his boat trapping lobsters.
A lot of “The Crown” is shot in closeup, or medium closeup, and it’s a canny choice, given that everything takes place in a closed-off world of closed-off emotions. You feel the grief when the Queen and her family receive the news of Mountbatten’s death, but it’s because of what they don’t or can’t articulate during a brutal time. You have to read their thoughts—the flickering hurt, the mirth, the dull incomprehension, the anger—because rarely does their spoken language approximate what you can see them experiencing. Morgan takes the Windsors’ collective repression and makes it a style.
Of the younger actors, O’Connor is especially adept at conveying physical discomfort and rage. With his shoulders hunched and his hands buried in his jacket pockets, O’Connor’s Prince Charles seems to have been made smug by martyrdom; it’s a martyrdom that grows more shrill and anguished after he meets Lady Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin) and, eventually, marries her. Charles does so out of duty, rather than love; like a closeted gay man who marries a woman for social acceptability and advancement, Charles turns Diana into his beard. Diana, however, who fantasizes about a perfect romantic union with a fairy-tale prince, wants more, dreams of more, as she roller-skates around desolate Kensington Palace, boogying to Duran Duran. (This is a great touch, the kind of thing you might see on “The Windsors,” a hilarious parody of life as a royal, also on Netflix.) Inevitably, the more Charles withholds love and attention, the more desperate Diana becomes for his approval, for control over her marriage. Her loneliness is a wound that Charles finds distasteful and longs to separate himself from, but he can’t: he must live in service to the crown. Their scenes together in enclosed spaces—in a car, on a plane—work particularly well, because the actors’ movement is limited and they must depend on their faces and their voices to convey the odd moments of joy or dismay. (It’s important to remember that both Charles and Diana had an interest in amateur theatrics; as a young man, the Prince wanted to be an actor, while Diana loved to dance.)
I don’t envy any actress trying to impersonate Diana, who, in some ways, remains the most relatable, and thus the most popular, English royal. Even with the enormous sympathy that Corrin evinces, especially when it comes to Diana’s bulimia and her struggle to be seen, she can’t quite find a center to the role. She seems disembodied somehow. She doesn’t so much convey Diana’s fears as express her fear of playing Diana. Corrin’s Princess stands over there, while the actress stands over here, and we have to bridge the distance with our own feelings and memories.
Tom Burke, who plays Dazzle Jennings, a friend of Princess Margaret’s, doesn’t have the weight of all that history to contend with, but his acting is so far superior to that of some of the other players that he raises the bar on truthfulness in performance. By the time he appears—it’s the mid-eighties—Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) has been made puffy by booze, indolence, and willfulness. She’s an inconsolable royal who, like Charles and Diana, loves to perform. Gumming up her potty mouth with red lipstick, Margaret waits for Dazzle. When we see him, it’s in medium long shot, and from Margaret’s point of view; without saying a word, he fills the frame with vibrancy and perversion, snaking his way toward Margaret as David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” plays in her sitting room. Dazzle and Margaret, as they prance around, look like babies in evening dress; champagne is their milk. They’re a couple who don’t want the party to end. What would they do if it did? When the music stops, the Princess leans over to kiss Dazzle, who raises his hand to block her from doing so. The camera pauses on Burke’s face, and you can see what his character feels in that moment: a mixture of sadness, pity, and curiosity. It’s this quality—this ability to physically manifest imagination—that makes Burke, to my mind, one of the finest actors of his generation. (He exercised a similar precision and perverse understanding of discomfort in Joanna Hogg’s 2019 film, “The Souvenir.”) Watching Burke—who ups Bonham Carter’s game, too—can break your heart, because this is not acting; it is being.
Colman’s characterization of the Queen is also less a performance than a refraction of reality. Each character in “The Crown” has a history, and Colman drapes herself in the Queen’s, as if in an ermine cape, and revels in it. There is a shattering scene in the fourth episode when the Queen is talking to Prince Philip about her failure to become the mother she wanted to be. She says that when her children were young she vowed that she would not have the nanny bathe them. And yet, when the time came and she tried to do it, she couldn’t. She can love only at a distance because she has been loved only at a distance. It’s in moments like this one that Morgan’s writing rises to the level of Colman’s performance, and his words support her vision of the Queen as a woman who lives in a world she didn’t make but has sworn to uphold, even if that means remaining silent, at least for a time, on the horror of colonialism, the horror of apartheid in South Africa, the horror of Britain’s oppression of Ireland, the horror of the recession under Thatcher’s conservative watch. It takes a great actress to make us feel that these horrors—very real ones that have scarred and disfigured many over the years—are part of Queen Elizabeth’s largely unspoken backstory. Colman brings them to the surface as subtly as she steers Morgan’s script away from the girl-fight clichés of Elizabeth butting heads with Thatcher or Diana. She deals with these scenes with reason and, sometimes, controlled passion, but never melodrama, because that is not the person she is playing. Colman wants us to know that her interpretation of the Queen is hers, and also not hers: she is there to embody a living myth, and it is her job to show how that body responds when distressed or trying to express affection or disconcerted by the way the next generation wrestles with the problems of being in love and in trouble.
Honest and unhampered by affectation, Colman, the most humble of stars, shows us how little Elizabeth knows and how much she needs to know in her changing world. At one of the family gatherings, Thatcher, the daughter of a greengrocer, is clearly uncomfortable as the royals try to convince her to join in the drinking game Ibble Dibble, which involves blackening one’s face with a burned cork. Watching Colman and the brilliant Marion Bailey, who plays the Queen Mother, as they attempt to jolly Thatcher along, their faces striped with soot, I was stunned by what the royals didn’t see in their game, blinded myself by the truth of their blindness. ♦
