A movie about a stuttering monarch, without car chases or sinewy superheroes, hardly sounds like blockbuster box-office fare.
But in a less flashy way, The King's Speech, nominated for 12 awards at tomorrow's Oscars, is about a hero, one who battles an invisible enemy that torments nearly 70 million people around the world. In demystifying the little-understood speech impediment, the award-winning film reveals myths and fascinating truths about stuttering and has won praise from stutterers of all ages.
For Erik Yehl, an 11-year-old Chicago boy who began stuttering in preschool, the movie's message is, "I'm not stupid."
It is a stigma all people who stutter contend with: the notion that because their words sometimes sputter or fail to come out at all, their minds must be somehow mixed up.
The real need
"People who stutter — their minds are perfectly good, they're not deaf and they don't need to be told to breathe. What they need is to be listened to," said Susan Hardy, who saw the film with her son Aidan, a 14-year-old Chicago eighth-grader who also stutters.
Aidan's mini-review? "It was great!" he said.
The film depicts King George VI, father of England's Queen Elizabeth, as a reluctant leader tortured by his stuttering. But with a sense of duty as England confronts a second world war, he musters the courage to seek speech therapy so he can address and calm an anxious nation.
The focus on George's relationship with his eccentric speech therapist whose insistance on treating him as an equal makes the king a sort of everyman for stutterers.
Stuttering affects almost 1 per cent of the global population, including three million in the US. It typically begins in early childhood as kids are learning to speak and is more common in boys. About 5 per cent of children stutter but most outgrow it. The condition tends to run in families and genes are thought to be involved in at least some cases.
For Yehl, a soft-spoken boy who loves basketball and video games, the film was sometimes tough to watch, because it hit so close to home. A scene showing George failing miserably while trying to give a speech to a packed stadium was particularly difficult. British actor Colin Firth's portrayal makes the shame George feels uncomfortably palpable even for non-stutterers.
"It was hard to hear the speech because he stuttered and I hate to hear that," Yehl said.
Surprising truths
Yehl's stuttering becomes most noticeable when he is nervous. Curiously, his speech flows fluently when he calls out to teammates while playing basketball.
The film reveals another surprising truth: singing often frees stutterers of their problem. And experts say that for some people, stuttering disappears when they speak to infants or animals, imitate a foreign dialect or perform a role onstage.
Speech therapist Stephanie Hirsh, who runs the Centre for Communication & Speech Therapy in Highland Park, Illinois, said she learnt to control her stuttering by using a singing-like breathing technique to maintain a continuous flow of air while talking.
Let stutterers know they have all the time they need to express themselves and that you really want to hear what they have to say, Hirsh advises.
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