Lioness in Autumn
The mood of the fifth season of The Crown—ruminative, retrospective, even elegiac—couldn’t have been better scripted for the moment. For the first time, the audience comes to Peter Morgan’s serial treatment of the House of Windsor with the knowledge that its principal subject, Queen Elizabeth II, is no longer with us. The fact of her recent passing creates a surreal sensation as you watch the opening images, which depict the young Elizabeth (Claire Foy) commissioning the Royal Yacht, Britannia, at the outset of her reign. The montage is shot in black and white, incorporating newsreel footage of the actual event, before the visuals turn into color and Foy’s dovelike eyes give way to the crows’ feet of Imelda Staunton (Elizabeth’s latest iteration). It’s a monarch in autumn that she embodies, in a season suffused with loss and foreboding tragedy. Without even intending it, Morgan and his collaborators have anticipated the death of the Queen.
The season opens in 1991, Elizabeth’s 65th year and the first of the new conservative Prime Minister, John Major (Johnny Lee Miller). The operating structure of the series has been to tell the twin story of Britain’s social and political history alongside that of the royals, joining the two narratives in the relationship between Her Majesty and various PMs over the decades. This pairing began with her tutelage under Winston Churchill (John Lithgow) and continued through Labor’s Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins) and onto Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson).
Miller plays Major as affable and retiring, sympathetic to Elizabeth’s personal troubles. But the portrait of British society through his tenure is non-existent; the audience gets little sense of his policies, leadership, or effect on the population. For much of the season, he serves as an informal marital counselor for the royal family, guiding Charles (Dominic West) and Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) through the rocky shoals of separation and divorce, all the while offering a tender ear for the Queen. Miller purrs along soothingly in the part—you wish you could go home with him, instead of being trapped in the psychodrama behind the palace walls.
If the season seems fixated on the royals to the exclusion of wider Britain, that might be because Britain in these years was unusually fixated on them. The voyeuristic dimension of the institution stands forth in these episodes, emphasizing the mutually parasitic relationship between the press and the monarchy. The first episode shows a calculating Charles taking Diana and the boys on a Mediterranean cruise, ostensibly to repair their marriage (a second honeymoon, he calls it) but in reality just to play the paparazzi. The fifth episode, “The Way Ahead,” treats exclusively of “tampongate,” the infamous phone call between Charles and Camilla (Olivia Williams) that was intercepted by an amateur spook and sold to the tabloids. The Prince of Wales is outraged, but responds by granting a television exclusive for the purposes of damage control.
Diana, too, gives a series of damning interviews, first discreetly in book form in episode two, then in her bombshell conversation with Martin Bashir (Prasanna Puwanarajah) of the BBC, which is covered in the seventh and eighth episodes. During the divorce negotiations, Camilla hires a PR guru to polish her image; earlier, Philip (Jonathan Pryce) demands that Elizabeth show herself in public with Penelope Knatchbull (Natascha McElhone), the wife of his first cousin, in order to launder their intimate emotional relationship. The media’s cycle of burnishing the monarchy on the one hand, while airing its titillating scandals on the other, sums up the toxic nature of the whole bloody business.
The universal turnover in casting this season speaks to the generational sea change underfoot, played out most directly in the romantic and marital relationships of the household. Elizabeth’s strength, in the series, is her sober devotion to duty and suppression of her personal feelings for the sake of the nation. Yet time and again, this adherence to protocol betrays her when it comes to her relations. By failing to allow her sister, Margaret (Lesley Manville), or Charles to marry for love, she’s repeatedly hoisted on her own petard. Same with her other children. In “Annus Horribilis,” which chronicles the harrowing events of 1992, Charles and Andrew (James Murray) ask her for permission to divorce, while Anne (Claudia Harrison) requests a blessing to remarry not long after the dissolution of her first union.
Meanwhile, Philip and Elizabeth continue to negotiate their own complex coupling. When the Queen asks Major about the key to a successful partnership, he quotes Dostoevsky’s wife, whose answer was to have nothing in common with one’s spouse and make no demands on their soul. The souring of marital bliss emerges most painfully in the saga of Diana and Charles’s divorce; episode nine, “Couple 31,” intersperses mock interviews with everyday Britons seeking termination of their marriages as the Prince and Princess join them at court. Humanizing the royals has always been Morgan’s strength.
The writing and direction take on a sparse quality in this season. The mood feels muffled and interior, as if you’re stuffed underwater. Relying on the fact that he’s now entered history that much of his audience witnessed firsthand, Morgan doesn’t dramatize details with the same specificity. He counts on our memories of these public events to fill in the gaps, going for emotional resonance over strict plotting. At times, especially in the initial episodes, this creates an oblique, muted quality in the show. The narrative spine doesn’t emerge until the latter episodes, especially with Diana’s interview. The BBC’s deception of the Princess in securing the interview is revealed, which lends a bit of spy thriller feeling to the proceedings.
But as usual with Morgan, the acting lifts the show, with nearly everyone turning in fine-tuned, arresting performances. West is a counter-intuitive choice as Charles (he seems too self-possessed to play the anxious whig) but he locates the Prince’s vocal and facial tics and intellectual idiosyncrasies palpably. Olivia Williams is unrecognizable as Camilla, so thoroughly does she take on the woman’s persona, and Murray and Harrison look so much like their real life analogues it’s uncanny. As Margaret, Manville gives an elegant, incomparable performance, especially in her scenes in “Annus Horribilis” with Timothy Dalton, who plays the princess’s old flame, Peter Townsend. Their reunion—dancing, listening to Hoagie Carmichael’s “Star Dust”—rekindles the high comic atmosphere that surrounds Margaret in the first two seasons, mixed with bitterness.
It’s Debicki as Diana, though, who truly stuns the viewer. Her resemblance to the doomed Princess goes beyond mere physical resemblance. She transforms herself so completely into the mature Diana Spencer it’s breathtaking. She seems inhabited by the woman’s ghost, from her blushing shyness to her shimmering effect in public. Episode seven, “No Woman’s Land,” showcases Diana’s romance with Hasnat Khan (Humayun Saeed), a British-Pakistani surgeon; when she beckons him with her eyes to kiss her, standing at her door, you find yourself falling completely for the woman. In other moments, you ache for how she misreads the family’s intentions and sabotages her own position. Slowly, with an air of weighty inevitability, Morgan turns her into a truly tragic figure: her dying bird quality played up as she watches Swan Lake, her death foretold in moments such as when her car jolts out of control down the street. She and Charles share a taught scene in the wake of their divorce that feels like a one-act play; West and Debicki go toe-to-toe for ten minutes on an emotional rollercoaster that captures the essence of the famous couple. It’s Morgan’s best writing of the episodes—you wish he’d done more.
There’s one weak point in the season, and it’s a major one: the title role. Claire Foy and Olivia Colman each put their own mark on the Queen while maintaining a continuity of spirit. Staunton makes admirable attempts, but that fellow-feeling is lacking in her performance. Her Elizabeth comes off as weak in her dotage, a diminutive, emotional simpleton. Your mind goes to Helen Mirren’s portrayal of the monarch in this same period in Morgan’s 2006 film The Queen, in which she mixed aloofness with a strong regal presence. That presence eludes Staunton; her Elizabeth sits in the shadows, outshined by the ensemble. The one exception is her scenes at the end of the sixth episode, “Ipatiev House,” which explores the failure of her grandfather, George VI, to rescue his cousin, Tsar Nicholas, and his family from the clutches of the Bolsheviks. The Romanovs’ murders (portrayed with shocking brutality) haunt the episode, and Staunton’s face conveys conflicting emotions as she confronts a rival for her husband over the cause of the historic crime.
Throughout its five seasons, The Crown has taken up the question that animates the films of the great director David Lean: what does it mean to be British? The sunsetting of the empire forms its backdrop, never more so than in this latest iteration, and the shifting mores and character of Britain continue to baffle its monarch and her hidebound institution. The answer Morgan suggests is a classic one: style. One of the most intriguing episodes, “Mau Mau,” charts the rise of Mohamed El-Fayed (the wonderful character actor Salim Daw) and his son, Dodi (Khalid Abdalla). From the streets of Cairo, a young Mohamed catches a glimpse of Edward, the Duke of Windsor (the debonair Alex Jennings, reprising his role)—Elizabeth’s uncle and perpetual source of woe.
Mohamed vows to imitate the Duke and all things English, procuring the Ritz in Paris, then Edward’s estate, and even the Duke’s former valet, Sydney Johnson (an impeccable Jude Akuwudike), to teach him the manners and sartorial ways of Anglo aristocracy. But try as he might, he fails to gain access to the Queen herself, settling for an audience with Diana and her fateful meeting with his son. Whatever it means to be British, keeping the monarch floating above the public is essential. Or as Fintan O’Toole puts it in a recent essay for The New York Review of Books:
To occupy her royal persona, Elizabeth had to suppress her human one, to make herself as much like a dead person as possible.
And now she really is dead. The last episode depicts the decommissioning of Britannia and the UK’s handover of Hong Kong, Charles looking particularly anemic next to the striding Chinese officers. The discordant views of his and his mother on the monarchy come to a head at last, his attempted alliance with Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) and New Labour blowing up in his face. You watch with the ironic knowledge that it will be another quarter of a century before he accedes to the throne, during which time Elizabeth will achieve unrivaled love from her subjects, even as the family dysfunction cascades through her grandchildren. Charles covets the crown for himself, thinking it will afford him the self-expression and innovation he so desperately craves. But heavy is the head that wears it, and as Diana tries to tell him, there can be no freedom for the poor souls ensconced within its orbit. Morgan gives us a final shot of the Princess as she glances at herself in the mirror, an enigma to the end. The crown’s greatest casualty is about to come.