'The King's Speech' review: Leader finds voice

"The King's Speech" is a warm, wise film - the best period movie of the year and one of the year's best movies. It begins with the fear of a prince and ends with the courage of a king, finding room in between for terrific joy and drama.

The king is George VI (Colin Firth), the upright naval officer who took the throne in late 1936 after his brother Edward abdicated. The speech refers not to one specific discourse (there are a couple of crucial ones), but to the man's tortured elocution in general. He had an unyielding stutter, a career that forced him to speak to the masses - and a speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) who helped him reconcile the two. That one is a commoner, the other a royal in the waning years of the British Empire adds a notable shudder of class tension to the mix.

"The King's Speech " is also a study of friendship in unlikely circumstances; and as such, it relies on the considerable gifts of its two leads. As Prince Albert, the uke of York, Firth pulls off a daunting technical feat without ceding any authenticity or depth of emotion. This is no stunt performance: From his opening crisis at a microphone at Wembley to his last historic speech, he earns and owns our sympathy.

As Australian therapist Lionel Logue, Rush exudes the spry theatricality and constant alertness of a fellow who always seems to be up to something, even when he's not. When the duke arrives for his first session in Lionel's humble basement office, Lionel insists on calling him "Bertie," the family nickname, laying the groundwork for much dramatic head butting.

Although the king's convulsive speech stumbles while his brother (an utterly feline Guy Pearce) sashays about with the American socialite Wallis Simpson (Eve Best), the movie is as fluent as they come under Tom Hooper's brisk, mellifluous direction and David Seidler's quick-witted and tactically canny script.

Derek Jacobi has a few plummy scenes as the archbishop of Canterbury. Michael Gambon has a few blustery ones as Bertie's father, King George V. Helena Bonham Carter does her finest and most carefully gauged work in years as his wife, the Duchess of York. We see him through her comprehending eyes; we sense his backbone, and his fear. Ramrod straight and softly emotive, he's a reluctant warrior for the age of radio.

-- Advisory: vulgar language.

E-mail Amy Biancolli at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle