A film director must train himself to be the most literal-minded person on earth:  she deals only in what can be seen or heard, and so must reject everything literary, every metaphor or simile or pun, every rhetorical tool we use to interpret or construct a text.  A film director cannot say, “Her lips were the color of rose petals.”  She cannot say, “He was sad,” or “She was smart,” or “The day was boring.”  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there are a million billion things we can say with ordinary language that no image or sound effect can express.

Thus, great directors have minds so obdurately concrete they can sound like total idiots.  Screenwriters often relate horror stories about directors’ insistent, simple-minded demands, like “What EXACTLY in the backyard is she looking at when she’s staring out the window?” or “Which room in the house did he run out of to answer the door?”  Listen to the William Friedkin’s and Phillip Kaufman’s commentaries on The Exorcist and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and you’ll hear two of America’s smartest, I would even argue intellectual, film makers do little more than describe the contents of shot after shot.  Because for them, that’s what the movie IS.  Through discipline and talent they [with managed to transmute the vaporous symbolic meanings of the text into the tangible reality before the camera. 

If Stephen Frears were a character in his most recent movie, he would be the Queen.  She does not truck in metaphors.  She exists in an entirely concrete reality of stiff settees, hot tea and slugging through muck on her various estates.  Symbols are for the feeble-minded (the Queen Mother obsessively elaborating her own funeral) or the poor (leaving all those bouquets at the Buckingham palace gates.)  In her audience with Tony Blair, she startles the newly-elected PM into silence by oh-so-casually mentioning that Churchill sat in the same chair.  For her Churchill was a man.  For Blair he is an icon.

Blair is the Queen’s opposite, not just because he is a liberal and a modernizer, but because he lives in a world of symbols.  He is a politician too.  He grasps that Diana (like Churchill) has become a symbol, perceives the threat that poses to the monarchy, and understands the public want their Queen to be a symbol too (of mourning.)

The Queen, however, bucks against all that.  (For the full significance of the pun see below.)  First, for her Diana, like Churchill, was not a symbol but a real person (and a real nuisance.)   Second, her own queenhood is very real, and not symbolic.  After all, you can’t spell “reality” without “real” (or royal.)  (Okay, I’ll stop that.) 

The battle of wills between her and Blair turns into a clash of ideas, a Hegelian struggle between two irreconcilable world views, which after a monumental. . .

Well, no.  It’s not that kind of movie. 

What happens to both is a deus ex machina.  The queen sees a deer.  A male deer.  In the rays of golden sun.  (Okay, enough!)  The deer is symbolic of something.  (Probably the queen herself, since it is being hunted on grounds of her own estate by her dense husband and grandchildren.)  (Interesting how while a director cannot say “She is exciting,” or “He is funny,” or “The day is long,” he can say “The deer is symbolic” simply by shooting it a certain way [with the camera of course.])

Anyway, the deer does not make it.  The Queen sees its carcass hanging in an adjacent hunting club, and has a personal epiphany about what it’s like to lose a symbol, goes on TV and gives a nice little speech.

Tony Blair has to wait a few years for his epiphany, but we all know it’s coming.  The symbolism of weapons of mass destruction will get trumped by the reality of their non-existence (for the British public, at least.)  Seeing into the future (a crown can really put your thoughts in perspective), the Queen informs him, “They’ll turn on you too.”  Oh, snap!  Ah, the prerogative of hindsight.

Then they go on a stroll for a chat as if nothing happened.

And actually, nothing did.

Gael Garcia Bernal, one of the stars of Babel (and Science of Sleep, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and The Motorcycle Diaries) gave an interview on NPR on Friday that put a lot of these things into focus for me.  Here’s what he said (almost word for word):  “As someone in a poor country, every action you take is political.  You go out on the street or not--that’s political.  Where you go to buy stuff--that’s political too.  You can’t help but be political.”

So true.  The rich can buy reality; the poor have to settle for symbolism.  But as a FILM DIRECTOR from a poor country, how can you make the reality of your movie symbolic?  How do you draw all those parallels without resorting to rhetoric (giving speeches)?

You can twist the reality of the story into a pretzel, so different bits of it can signify the whole.  Yes, the connections are arbitrary, but look at the larger meaning!  (This time it has something to do with loving your children.)

If you want a gifted filmmaker to connect all the dots for you so you don’t have to, by all means, see Babel.

You’ll see terrific performances, great cinematography, another wonderful score by the master of the ronrocco Santoallalo. 

And if you come out feeling a little bit used, well. . .me too.