★★★★☆
The beaming red Netflix logo received a loud supportive cheer from the audience (mostly critics) when I saw this historical drama at last month’s Venice Film Festival. It was hardly surprising. After an initially bumpy entry into the world of original film-making (remember the teenage drama iBoy? Or its Emily Mortimer sci-fi flick Spectral? No? Probably for the best), the streaming giant is fast becoming a dominant industry player and a reinvigorating force in the previously cash-strapped realm of serious cinema for grown-ups (no superheroes allowed).
This year’s forthcoming awards season, then, looks likely to be defined by Netflix. It will be dropping masterpieces into multiplexes like cinematic depth charges, just to remind us of its newly acquired prowess. On the way is the impeccable divorce drama Marriage Story (Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are consciously, and often viciously, uncoupling in one of the year’s best films), the beautifully played papal pas de deux The Two Popes (there will be nominations, surely, for its stars, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce), and an epic $200 million gangster movie from Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino called The Irishman (said to be the director’s sharpest film since Goodfellas). Place your bets now.
First up, however, is this 15th-century period piece (inspired by Shakespeare’s Henriad plays) that stars Timothée Chalamet as Henry V and features widescreen vistas (Hungary, standing in for medieval England), sprawling battle scenes, a cast of thousands, barnstorming performances, intricately crafted dialogue and sophisticated political subtext. It is, in short, exactly the type of costly project that risk-averse Hollywood simply refuses to make any more. Netflix is notoriously coy about releasing budgetary figures, but going by its reputed content expenditure of $12 billion last year, The King must have required a serious chunk of change.
The casting is a joy. Chalamet, the star of Call Me By Your Name, here proves, once again, that his adventurous choices are matched only by his prodigious talent as his simmering, introspective Henry traces a tasty character arc from booze-sodden young wastrel (an ashen-faced, lank-haired Hal) to ruthless battle-hardened monarch (a steely-eyed Henry with familiar pudding-bowl cut and perfectly plummy accent). Along the way he is riddled with anxiety, suspicion and self-doubt (“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” from Henry IV, Part II, could be the film’s subtitle) and seeks the support of his hedonistic companion John Falstaff (played by the film’s co-writer Joel Edgerton, sporting excess embonpoint, and never better).
“I have been forced to rely upon the counsel of men whose loyalty I question every waking moment,” Henry says, desperately, after his coronation, while pleading with Falstaff for his guidance and his friendship. “The king has no friends,” comes the mentor’s tough-love reply. “Only followers. And foe.” Almost immediately Henry is faced with the greatest challenge of his reign — the call to war of his nemesis, the Dauphin of France.
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Enter Robert Pattinson as the Dauphin, unleashing a high-octane performance that matches Chalamet’s beat for beat and makes you wish, even as he’s reciting his lines (in an accent as thick as béarnaise sauce), that he could stick around for the entire film (or indeed enjoy his own spin-off project, Dauphin: Ze Movie). “I enjoy to speak ze English,” says Pattinson as the bottle-blond Dauphin during his first encounter with Henry. “It eees simple and ugh-lee.”
The French prince is pivotal, of course, to Henry’s transition from louse to leader, and pushes the film towards the inevitable climax on the fields of Agincourt. David Michôd, the Australian director (he made the standout crime movie Animal Kingdom) and the film’s other co-writer, shoots this climactic sequence with unfettered invention, depicting the battle setting as a boggy inferno and the fighting as something akin to a mass brawl in the Glastonbury mosh pit. The scene has been compared to the infamous Battle of the Bastards episode of Game of Thrones, yet it’s far messier, less choreographed and certainly muckier.
It’s the ending, however, that gives the film clout. It features a quietly mesmerising Lily-Rose Depp as Catherine of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France, who takes Henry’s hand in marriage while turning his world view on its head.
In a fairer world The King would be leading Netflix’s prestigious Oscar charge (with nominations for Chalamet and Edgerton guaranteed). Yet the film has been talked down since Venice, and roundly criticised for being too sombre and too serious, with, presumably, not enough jokes. Which is a shame. Because there’s a space in cinema for serious too. And for smart writing, accomplished directing and thoughtful historical reflection. And, obviously, for a film such as this, which has them all.
The King is in cinemas from today and on Netflix from Nov 1
