Posterized: His Majesty Colin Firth Makes a LOT of Movies
Friday, April 11, 2014 at 5:47PM 
The King speaks. Often in motion pictures, in point of fact. Colin Firth has been a mainstay in British and Hollywood cinema since his terrific debut opposite Rupert Everett in the boy's school classic Another Country (1984). But it's not all stiff homoerotic upper-class Brit movies (though there's a fair share of that). He seems to have no ego whatsoever working in large ensembles, occasionally headlining, and (we assume) gets along with everyone given how often he returns to the same co-stars and directors (multiple films with Kidman and Everett and Egoyan and more). This year US audiences are getting not one not two but SIX Colin Firth films: Gambit (released a couple of years ago in the UK), Atom Egoyan's Devils Knot, Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight, and three (!!!) with Nicole Kidman: Paddington (he's the voice of the bear), the thriller Before I Sleep and the post-war drama The Railway Man which is in theaters now after a quiet festival bow last year.
In the new film he plays a troubled WWII vet suffering from PTSD before there was a name for it. Jeremy Irvine plays Firth as a young man in his POW days and Nicole Kidman provides tough-love wifely support. Still, this is Firth's show through and through. He's quite good in it though I'll admit that the movie was a little tentative and basic for my tastes.
A temporary projection glitch in the screening at TIFF I attended (strangely the only film I didn't write about that I saw there) stopped the image just as Nicole Kidman entered in one of her only forceful scenes. A flock of gentlemen turned around to look at her and were then paralyzed for several minutes gawking at her. Which is exactly what happens to me whenever Nicole Kidman enters a movie. I haven't seen it acted out so literally since Ewan MacGregor and the patrons of the Moulin Rouge went slack-jawed in unison when she descended from the ceiling singing "Diamonds".
But I digress.
We're here to talk Colin Firth. So anticlimactic now, right? Apologies to Mr Firth! How many of his movies have you seen? (Please tell me you've seen Another Country)
