The King's Speech - a landmark for meaningful cinema

The King's Speech is all over the news for sweeping the Oscars this year. I went to see this movie today and I really liked it. It is certainly a great movie about a touchy subject. It uses real-life story of King George VI's struggle with his speech problem to create sensitivity about people who stammer.

The King was so badly affected by his inability to speak fluently that every public speech or radio broadcast used to be a nightmare for him. However, he overcame his difficulty with determination, sustained effort, and help from an Australian speech therapist.

This movie assures every young person with speaking difficulty that it is possible for him to get over it, and it is useful education for his near and dear ones.

There have been a number of great movies in the past that have given sensitive treatment to different challenging conditions. Black, Sparsh, Tare Zamin Par, Shor, Koshish are example of some of the great Hindi movies on the subject. But the poor stammerer has remained the butt of jokes and caricatured badly in most movies.

Every one in a hundred persons faces speech dis-fluency. It is very likely that most of us are familiar with someone in the family, or has a friend who faces trouble every time he opens his mouth. We see him struggle with trivial tasks like saying his name, or reciting a text. However, most of us know very little about why it happens, how to react to it, and what we can do to help the person who is facing it.

A typical stammerer himself makes all attempts (in vain) to sweep his trouble under the carpet and hide his difficulties, which makes the matters worse for him. Since he does not talk about it, how will those around him know what he is going through?

That's why this movie has done a great job to bring this issue out from under the carpet and promote healthy discussion and education about it. Movies like this will go a long way to shape the attitude of society towards people who stammer.

I also read the book on the same subject with a lot of interest. The book has much more detail taken from the diaries of Lionel Logue - the man who helped the king with his speech.

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Three years after I wrote this post, I was moved to see very sensitive portrayal of stutter in a blockbuster Hindi film, and who could have done it better than my favorite Amir Khan in the recent super hit Dhoom 3?