AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS8/10 6 years ago
[8.4/10] There’s an old saying that the definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the “William Tell Overture” without thinking of *The Lone Ranger*. Well, a corollary to that may be that the definition of an uncultured film bro like yours truly is someone who can’t watch *Elizabeth* without thinking of *Game of Thrones* and *The Godfather*.
The former is, perhaps, a bit more forgivable (albeit putting the cart before the horse). It’s no great secret that George R.R. Martin pulled liberally from English history to found the dynastic conflicts in his fantasy world. And you don’t need Yorks and Lancasters squabbling to enjoy the different power centers moving against one another in a medieval setting. In fact, it wouldn’t be shocking if the powers that be at HBO explicitly looked at *Elizabeth* as a blueprint for how to translate a potentially stuffy costume drama into a twisty dollop of back-stabbery and palace intrigue.
That’s a lot of what *Elizabeth* delivers in its most thrilling interludes. It gives you conflicting pushes from Catholics and Protestants. It offers competing offers from France and Spain. It depicts threats from without and within in the fraught early weeks and months of a tenuous reign. There are too many power brokers and players to count, each trying to counsel the new queen, secure the fortunes of their nation or religion, or own position, and generally cause trouble for one another.
It’s a hell of a lot of fun. Walsingham’s plots and plans, to avoid assassination, to secure legislation, and to eliminate the Queen’s rivals, all have a slick and sly quality lent to them be Geoffrey Rush’s superb presence. At time, the tangles and competing schemes can be hard to follow, but the basics are plain enough, and the precarious nature of the Queen’s position among all these ploys and power grabs add stakes and tension to each competitive move.
But the heart of the story comes from Elizabeth herself. That’s where the *Godfather* comparisons come in. As much as the film is a story about the title character navigating those intersecting threads of power and plotting, it’s just as much about an outsider to those machinations and ill-dealings being swept into them and eventually a master over them. It’s a film about strength found and asserted, but also innocence lost and corrupted.
Hell, there’s even a near mirror image scene, where Elizabeth, having taken several steps down the path to being the ruthless powerbroker that Walsingham, among others, have encouraged her to become, orders the elimination of those who would challenge her position, in a montage that calls to mind Michael Corleone's own orchestrated murder of the heads of rival families. It’s the same sort of sign of a relative neophyte seizing control and engaging in the dirty work they’d previously shied away from.
The difference, then, is that *Elizabeth* is a love story, or rather an anti-love story. The film deals with the fact that its protagonist is a woman in a field dominated by men in a way that *The Godfather* obviously couldn’t. That means pressures to marry for political reasons. The movie does a good job of creating parallels between the leverage people attempt to exert on Elizabeth’s romantic life with the same they try to exert politically, with her decision not to marry being symbolic of her go-it-alone approach in her throne and in her heart.
It’s also a story of betrayal, not just from the double-and-triple crossings that are peppered throughout the film, but in the one man who seems to love Elizabeth for who she is rather than what she is. The flirtations and interludes between Elizabeth and Lord Robert, the man who represents her connections to her life before the crown, are as endearing and sumptuous in the beginning as they are cold and bitter by the end. The relationship helps make Elizabeth relatable, and helps chart a path from the naive, fun-loving woman who dances at her coronation, to the self-assured monarch who forces her one-time suitor to witness her declaration that she’ll never marry.
The film both benefits and suffers from the trappings of the 1990s prestige picture. There are an endless array of gorgeous costumes, beautifully lit medieval backdrops, and soaring operating tones in dramatic moments. The cinematography and editing in particular are striking, with an array of symmetrical and unbalanced shots that subliminally underscore the power dynamics at play, and tightly edited sequences like in dances between Elizabeth and Robert that convey all the closeness or fury between them with a few judicious cuts.
But that would all amount to far far less without the incredible performance of Cate Blanchett as the title character. Far more than the conspicuous costume and hairstyle changes that signal Elizabeth’s gradual transition, Blanchett finds all the shade in the queen’s metamorphosis from wide-eyed naif to Machiavellian monarch. The innocent joy she shows in the early portions of the film, the anxious setbacks, achievements, and learning she does whilst fending off the pressures of her advisors and opponents in its middle portions, and the cold-blooded politics she plays and symbol she becomes at the end of the picture require the full range of Blanchett’s talents, and she never falters for a second.
But for an inveterate Philistine like me, that performance is in service of a film that calls to mind works that might hold similar appeal to the period piece set. It’s too damning with faint praise to say that *Elizabeth* can match or surpass the palace intrigue and internecine conflicts of *Game of Thrones*. It’s unduly reductive to match every story of innocence diminished and command assume to a riff on *The Godfather*. But despite bringing those projects to my uncultured mind, *Elizabeth* manages to chart its own path, adding dimensions of feminism, real life political and religious conflicts, and distinct realizations of its characters, Blanchett in particular,marking it as its own unique achievement.
