British films that make it to American screens these days often fall into two distinct niches: life is miserable and life is sweet. Given its quality headliners and high commercial profile, it’s no surprise that “The King’s Speech” a buddy story about aggressively charming opposites—the stutterer who would be king and the speech therapist—comes with heaping spoonfuls of sugar.

The story largely unfolds during the Great Depression, building to the compulsory rousing end in 1939 when Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. As a child, Albert, or Bertie as his family called him, the shy, sickly second son of King George V had a stutter debilitating enough that as an adult he felt compelled to conquer it. In this he was aided by his wife, Elizabeth, a steely Scottish rose and the mother of their daughters, Elizabeth, the future queen, and Margaret.

Albert meets his new speech therapist, Lionel Logue, reluctantly. As eccentric and expansive as Albert is reserved, Logue enters the movie with a flourish, insisting that they meet in his shabby-chic office and that he be permitted to call his royal client, then the Duke of York, by the informal Bertie. It’s an ideal odd coupling, or at least that’s what the director would have us believe as he jumps from one zippy voice lesson to the next, pausing every so often to wring a few tears.

To that generally diverting end, Albert barks and brays and raps out a calculatingly cute string of expletives, including the four-letter kind that presumably earned this cross-demographically friendly film its R. Before you know it, Elizabeth, known as the Queen Mother, is sitting on Bertie’s chest during an exercise while he lies on Logue’s floor, an image that is as much about the reassuring ordinariness of the royals as it is about Albert’s twisting tongue.

It isn’t exactly “Pygmalion”, not least because the director has no intention of satirizing the caste system that is one of this movie’s biggest draws. Unlike “The Queen” barbed look at the royal family after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, “The King’s Speech” takes a relatively benign view of the monarchy, framing Albert as a somewhat poor little rich boy condemned to live in a fishbowl, an idea that the director unwisely literalizes by overusing a fish eye lens. The royals’ problems are largely personal, embodied by King George playing the stern 19th-century patriarch to Logue’s touchy-feely Freudian father. And while Albert initially bristles at Logue’s presumptions, theirs is finally a democracy of equals, an angle that makes their inequities go down in a most uneventful way.