Classics Revisited: All Hail 'The Queen,' Still the Definitive Portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II

While Netflix's lavish period drama The Crown may have established itself as the pinnacle of our collective pop cultural shorthand for how we understand not only the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, but the larger struggles of the House of Windsor, Peter Morgan's six-season epic is not actually his best work --- or his most incisive depiction of the institution that The Crown has spent so long trying to unpack. No, that honor belongs to his 2006 film The Queen, a briskly paced, barely 100-minute-long exploration of duty, tradition, modernity, and service that unerringly finds the humanity at the heart of the neverending tension between the woman and the sovereign.

Set in 1997 during the week between Princess Diana's death in a Paris car crash and her funeral in London, the film explores the differing reactions that would shake the monarchy to its foundations, from the Royal Family's clueless but seemingly genuine desire to keep themselves out of the fray of an increasingly dramatic public mourning to Prime Minister Tony Blair's almost Clinton-esque ability to understand that what the British people wanted was someone to feel their pain. That the two sides of this divide --- illustrated via both Diana and Elizabeth, the Queen and the Prime Minister --- are full of rough edges and irreverent humor makes them no less deeply affecting. Morgan smartly refuses to take advantage of the opportunity to mock the monarchy's scandals or make Elizabeth the butt of a joke she would never have been in on.

Instead, The Queen is a quietly nuanced story of compassion --- for a powerful woman coping with a rapidly changing world and struggling to reorient her place within it, for a political leader who finds himself full of a growing sympathy for both a monarch and an institution his party has never particularly supported, and the memory of a woman whose loss devastated people she'd never met.