Elizabeth: The Golden AgeJust like a 16th-century episode of The Hills.
Posted Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007, at 6:00 PM ET
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal) is a great hulking slab of English cheese, Stilton perhaps, or Wensleydale. It's one part historical melodrama, two parts bodice-ripper (and that's no metaphor; at one point, Clive Owen's manly mitts literally tug at a lady-in-waiting's heaving corset). If you go in fully prepared for the cinematic equivalent of a grocery-store novel, this unnecessary sequel to Elizabeth (1998) has its pleasures: There's Cate Blanchett's ever-mobile and fascinating face, Owen's swarthy brooding, and some eye-poppingly lavish dresses and wigs. (The popularity of royal costume drama has given rise to a subgenre: textile porn.)
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StumbleUponThe action begins in 1585, 27 years into the Virgin Queen's reign. As a Spanish ambassador (a memorably fierce William Houston) warns Elizabeth of his country's hostile intentions, she's distracted by the dashing entrance of the English pirate and explorer Walter Raleigh (Owen). Raleigh bum-rushes the throne with tobacco, potatoes, and two Native Americans, urging the queen to fund his next voyage to the Virginia colony he's named in her honor. Instead, Elizabeth takes a shine to Raleigh and schemes to keep him hanging around court, eventually naming him head of the castle guard. In a plot with too many creaking gears, Geoffrey Rush is Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's chief adviser, who specializes in iron-maiden interrogations and general intrigue management.
Meanwhile, in Scotland (creak, creak), Elizabeth's exiled cousin Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) is plotting the queen's assassination. She's aided by a creepy Catholic inquisitor (Rhys Ifans) and an undifferentiated band of papist conspirators who meet at a conveniently symbolic dye factory, surrounded by dripping crimson liquid.
But Elizabeth: The Golden Age is less a chronicle of counter-Reformation hijinks than a 16th-century episode of The Hills. The real focus is the queen's unconsummated crush on the swashbuckling Raleigh, whom she simultaneously humiliates ("Kneel!") and flatters ("Rise, Sir Walter Raleigh"). Eventually, she encourages her favorite lady-in-waiting, Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish), to approach Raleigh on her behalf, with predictable results. Bess and Raleigh steal smooches in the priory, elaborate undergarments are ripped, and soon Elizabeth is banishing them both from court in a fit of adolescent pique.
The director, Shekhar Kapur, a Bollywood filmmaker who also directed the first Elizabeth, tries to enliven the static royal tableaux with 360-degree spins and crane-mounted swoops. The score by Craig Armstrong and A.R. Rahman is so heavy-handed as to suggest a Mel Brooks parody. When Raleigh rhapsodizes about the joy of sighting land at the end of a sea voyage, he's accompanied by a soaring musical theme. A courtier interrupts his speech to announce a visitor, and the music abruptly stops—but as Raleigh picks up where he left off, so does the inspirational crescendo. The big action climax, in which a CGI-enhanced Spanish Armada takes a drubbing from the British navy, has Owen hanging Errol Flynn-ishly from the mast of a ship as a triumphant, wigless Elizabeth watches from a nearby cliff. A spot of cheddar, anyone?
The original Elizabeth was notable mainly as the first major film vehicle for a startlingly pale, prodigiously gifted creature named Cate Blanchett. Now that Blanchett, like Elizabeth I herself, has firmly established her sovereignty, The Golden Age introduces another pretender to the Australian acting throne. Abbie Cornish is rumored to be shortlisted as the next Bond girl; she was very fine in last year's Candy and will appear in Stop Loss next year opposite Ryan Phillippe. Blushing and swooning in Clive Owen's arms may not be the biggest acting challenge she's ever faced, but Cornish brings a stock ingénue role to vivid life and manages to stand out even against Blanchett's white-hot glow.
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Remarks from the Fray:
Golden Age was a frightful mess. I attended it with a group of people not very well-versed in the history of the era, and they kept soliciting whispered historical-factoid asides from me to help them through the muddied plots. Stevens' comparisons to Mel Brooks parodies are dead-on. The score, complete with the de rigeur straight-tone treble/soprano solo, and full-throated choruses swelling at moments of "significance," was the exact opposite of what the filmmakers clearly intended--it was underwhelming, and almost distractingly silly. I felt and thought many of the same things as Stevens, including the absurdity of the '40s, swashbuckler staging and set of the naval battle scenes.
I was also disheartened by the portrayal of Elizabeth as an emotionally fragile, ineffectual leader more interested in her love life than leadership. I can't decide if this is an understandable attempt to help humanize a legendary ruler or sad pandering to wrongheaded ideas about female leadership. It was true that Elizabeth had male 'favorites' (with whom she carried on affairs); and that she would often fly into rages if her ladies became pregnant, often clapping their secret husbands in the Tower--however, her rages were by all observers' accounts driven by power/control-needs, paranoia, and narcissism, not by romantic heartache. She clapped many secret husbands (and wives) in the Tower, not just favorites such as Raleigh or Dudley. She was also not as dependent on Walsingham as depicted here (and his character was totally stripped down and denuded of all the intrigue and lust for power surrounding the fabled "Kingmaker").
It was a strange, jumbled assemblage of plots, actors whose characters were never fully named or explained, and, most irritatingly of all--indeed, cheesy, as Stevens would have it--the picture seemed absorbed in a sense of its own grandeur and pageantry. It was almost as though a bunch of set designers, costume makers, props mistresses, and musical composers took over the school and tied up the writer and director while they went to town with the production.
In the end, it was nothing grand; the pageant came to town, but there were no fully realized people on display, only floats.
--marzipan
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(10/13)