So King Mongkut didn't modernize Siam.....

It took a Western governess to do it for him?

This movie could have been called "White Woman's Burden." Or perhaps, as a tip of the hat to other movies of this ilk, "Dances with Thais", or especially, "The Last Thai". Anna emerges as the alpha Thai, just as Kevin Costner becomes the Alpha Red Man and Tom Cruise, the alpha Samurai.

At the end, with the leadership of the fictional Siam now in the hands of a mere boy, Anna survives as the last adult authority figure. This scenario echoes the genres of order, like the Western: the King, as a relic of the old system and a potential threat to the Westernized new social order, must be killed off so that the new nation, in effect, will be led by a white Western woman rather than by an adult Asian male.