Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) Movie Review
Shekhar Kapur’s original Elizabeth was an odd mutt of a film that tried to play English history as The Godfather, distinguished by Cate Blanchett’s marvelous embodiment of a woman who moves from pale, panicky ingénue to self-immolating autocrat, and backed by ferocious performances by Geoffrey Rush and Chris Ecclestone.
It was raw and upfront with sex scenes and Protestant bonfires in a strained attempt to prove this wasn’t no pansy-assed Merchant Ivory film. But its pretences to modern edginess and Byzantine artistry were hollow, its dramatics shallow – it’s not especially well-written or directed, in comparison to, say, The Lion in Winter or The Devils, which outclass it effortlessly. Elizabeth: The Golden Age retains almost all of the faults whilst keeping none of the virtues of the first film.
Kapur’s direction is even more pointlessly showy than before, threatening to turn his film into an ‘80s art-rock video – there’s one astonishingly stupid shot where the camera revolves endlessly about Blanchett in a frilly frock, and you expect her to start singing “Sweet Dreams” – whilst pushing aside concern for history and fidelity to his murky original in exchange for a high-camp mating of an Errol Flynn swashbuckler, a Bette Davis melodrama of a great woman of frustrated passion, and Blackadder.
Blanchett’s Elizabeth has turned into a mix of Marisa Paredes playing Blanche Dubois and a Rachel McAdams high school queen, who chucks a serious hissy fit when her boyfriend the quarterback prefers her appointed purse-clutcher. Clive Owen strolls in as Walter Raleigh, dripping charisma, sex appeal, and other bodily fluids, oddly, for the first time in his career, living up to every ounce of movie star potential in his scruffy frame.
This first third is almost a Carry On film as Elizabeth and Lady-In-Waiting Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish) jest, joke, and eagerly assess every male about them, from Rush’s aging Walsingham to some pimply German git who comes as a male order husband, whilst evidently preferring each-other in the bath. Raleigh comes heaven-sent, and Elizabeth uses Bess and Walt as meat-puppets to enact her cheated romance, then has the gall to get mad when they have one of those dissolve-riddled montage sex scenes in front of a fireplace.
Meanwhile, Philip II of Spain (Jordi Molla) and his Catholic ministers stalk dark churches, hiss and spit and plot. You can tell they’re the baddies because they wear black. They plan righteous fury as the Armada is built, and manipulate a plot that will force Elizabeth into executing Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) and thus provide a pretext for invasion. Morton, given about six lines of dialogue, tries to make up for it by twisting her face up and spitting words out in random accentuations, before getting put out of her misery by a guy with an axe.
When the Armada arrives, there’s a hopelessly romanticized version of the Battle of Gravelines where Walter personally Luke Skywalkers the fleet with a fire ship, with a little help from a Divine Wind. All of this actually makes the film entertaining in its first and final quarters – the unpretentious urge to go for broke and make grand romantic-adventure nonsense can be felt straining behind every scene, and busts loose in the bizarrely beautiful battle.
Unfortunately, the complete lack of depth to the historical background or to any character other than the histrionic Elizabeth results in the middle half becoming an intolerable mix of will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension and lazy attempts to recreate the Machiavellian atmosphere of the original, featuring Rhys Ifans as the least scary super-assassin in film history. Rush’s Walsingham has been sucked of juice by age and his deathbed scene is so cursory it’s an offense to the arts of good dramatic fulfillment.
Morton’s Dadaist contribution is immaterial. It also lacks the sexy, violent boldness of the first episode, and the villains are all ridiculous shadows of Ecclestone’s Norfolk. Blanchett also gives a weirdly perfunctory version of the Tilbury speech, curtailed (is “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman etc” too politically incorrect for this faux-feminist film that still portrays the end result of a powerful woman refusing to marry as loneliness, sexual frustration, and bitch queen wrath?) and so clunkily staged a piece of grandstanding (Blanchett’s horse won’t stand still), it could have been a satire staged for Extras.
