Anna and the King (1999)

Anna and the King arrives with the calm confidence of a prestige picture that knows precisely which awards it intends to lose. Andy Tennant's 1999 retelling of the Leonowens diaries is handsome, patient, and roughly two and a half hours of a British widow explaining the Enlightenment to a king who did not ask. Jodie Foster plays Anna with a spine of tempered steel, and the film surrounds her with a deep bench of Asian performers, Chow Yun-fat chief among them, which was not nothing in 1999. The palace is populated, textured, alive. The camera still finds its way back to the white lady at the center, as cameras tend to do.

The politics here are older than the decade that produced them. Anna argues that a man might love one woman, which the film treats as a radical proposition, and she publicly defies the court when Tuptim is sentenced, an outburst that costs the condemned woman her life and the film none of its dignity. An anti-colonial conscience is at work throughout: the British envoys sneer at Siam as backward, the East India Company trades in bribery and coups, and the young prince learns that slavery is a stain on his father's house. It is a critique of empire delivered from a comfortable carriage.

Thailand banned the film for insulting its monarchy and mangling its history, which remains a stronger critical position than most reviewers managed. The screenplay hands a foreign governess credit for abolition and religious freedom, a flattering fiction the descendants of the actual reformers might dispute. The result is a long, well-tailored romance with a conscience it wears lightly. The sermons are brief. The costumes are not.