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Sheen's Tony Blair is pitch perfect as well. In a matter of months this man goes from newly elected leader awkwardly bowing in the Queen's presence to telling her outright that her popularity is plummeting and that she's making a grave mistake in not publicly recognizing Diana's death. This is tremendous range—from intimidated to incredulous and finally to awestruck—and Sheen never under- or over-does any of these tricky emotions. But I wish the writers had helped us get from incredulous to awestruck a bit more smoothly. When Blair angrily defends the Queen to his snarky staff toward the end of the film, I'm taken a bit by surprise. I needed a few more links to his state of admiration.

The Queen and Prince Phillip look at the flowers from Di's admirers

While Jennings does a fine job as Prince Charles—an understandably tentative man caught between traditionalist parents and modernist leanings, between the woman he loves and the one he married, between his stoic mum and the emotional mother of his children—I simply wish they'd cast someone who looked a bit more like the real Prince Charles. In several scenes I was initially confused as to which royal figure or servant he was supposed to be. Also, Charles alludes to the fact there were two Dianas—the public one and the private one. Most of us are well acquainted with the public Diana; it would have been great if they'd given us a bit more of a sense of the private Diana. That also might have helped us better understand the uneasy relationship between her and the Royal Family.

My favorite scenes in the film are the many phone conversations between the Queen and Blair—he in his modest home surrounded by his children's toys, the family dry cleaning, the evening's dinner of slightly burnt fish sticks, she in various well-appointed rooms in the palace or the family estate at Balmoral being attended to by a small army of servants. It's as if Blair is the Queen's tour guide to a new modern era, deftly identifying the public mood and trying to communicate it with as much respect as the powerful, albeit clueless, recipient demands. And the Queen is like a mentor or history teacher, reminding her pupil Blair of the decades of rich tradition that have come before and made this nation what it is today.

Throughout these conversations they both gain respect for the other—along with a realization that they might actually need one another. A thin phone line and the weight of history spans the gap between these two people and their vastly different worlds. And it's the delicate dance they choreograph together in those phone conversations that makes this such a fascinating and moving study of a part of English culture. Whether they make any missteps along the way is for the viewer and future historians to decide.

1. Trace Blair's thoughts about the Queen and the Queen's thoughts about Blair throughout the film. How do they change throughout the course of the movie? What precipitates the change? What do they come to see and possibly respect in the other
2. Do you think the Royal Family was cold and unfeeling about Diana's death or were they simply upholding centuries' worth of tradition? Why does Diana trouble them so? What threat does she pose in their lives

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