ELIZABETH (1998)
"I am not your Elizabeth; I am no man's Elizabeth."
2.5 out of ****
Starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes, Christopher Eccleston Directed by Shekhar Kapur Written by Michael Hirst Cinematography by Remi Adefarasin
Watching ELIZABETH is like watching history dissolve before your very eyes. It retrofits the reign of Elizabeth the First (Cate Blanchett) so that it becomes no more than a spectacle for our amusement here at the end of the twentieth century. The poverty and the sickness, the abuse of the working and servant classes; the philosophies and habits of thought, the alchemical sense of world and being--all these and much more are ignored, while our own supposed interests are transposed into another era. This is the story of Elizabeth as we would like it to be: all politics, sex, treachery, a "Dynasty" for the 1500s. It's not exactly a bad movie, just an appallingly unsubtle one.
It is, however, craftily told and well played, charting Elizabeth's rise to power and assumption of responsibility. When we meet her, she is just another well-bred lady with no sense of what it takes to be a ruler; shortly thereafter, she ascends to the throne, bastard half-sister of Queen Mary, who is now dead. By the end, she has settled into that throne as the Virgin Queen, red tresses shorn, face masked in white greasepaint, ice-cold, diamond-hard. The path she takes is a difficult one. She has to tiptoe through the minefields of political expediency: Spain and France vie for her affection, hoping to subsume England through marriage; the factions in her own court plot her downfall, principal among them Lord Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston); she tries to balance her love for Lord Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes) against the nation's need for her to marry wisely and well and bear a child.
Elizabeth is unique among this dramatis personae: not only is she a woman, she's a time-traveller too. She is not a historical figure, but a refugee from today, a mouthpiece for comfortably liberal PC beliefs: she's a feminist, she advocates freedom of religion, she's sexually liberated. It's not that Elizabeth wouldn't make a good feminist icon--she does--but refusing to implicate her in her own time and its attendant prejudices means that her iconic status remains unearned. It is too easy to identify with her, to root for her. A woman who embodied progressive ideals despite the burden of her own assumptions and weaknesses would be a genuine icon. A woman who retroactively embodies contemporary ideals--and their attendant prejudices--becomes merely a vehicle for the scriptwriter. She has no interior life, no sense of human complexity. She is perfect, transcendent: she is all surface, all illusion.
Blanchett's performance does make it a very convincing illusion, and the other actors too impart a zest and engagement to material that doesn't really deserve it. They brood, they strut, they emote, they connive, all on cue, all by the numbers, with that impeccable sense of not-quite-overplayed theatricality that the Brits do so well. (Australians do it well too, apparently: Geoffrey Rush is deliciously wicked as Walsingham, an utter bastard but a loyal advisor.) But the performances, and Remi Adefarasin's sumptuous photography, are rather spoiled by Shekhar Kapur (BANDIT QUEEN), whose direction seems inspired by a nigh-unbreachable diktat: never let a shot last more than five seconds, or, if you do, make sure the camera is always moving. Coverage of a scene is one thing; this is smotherage. It betokens a nervousness about the material, a refusal to let it stand on its own merits, and serves as a smokescreen to hide the hollowness of the thing, the lack of any authentic historical perspective.
It may seem rather unfair to criticize the movie for its ahistoricity: it is not an uncommon problem in period pieces, and it is to some extent a forgivable one. We want to see the bright costumes, the sprightly dances, the hallowed rituals. We don't want to see the dirt, the squalor, the disease. We want story, not sociology. But still: the sense in ELIZABETH that history exists solely for our entertainment is persistent and aggravating.
Consider a love scene in Elizabeth's bedroom: the bed happens to be veiled by translucent silk hangings, of the kind found in your average soft-core sex flick, so that the coyly half-shown lovemaking has that hazy-focus art-porn look. Maybe Elizabeth's bedroom really did look like that, but I doubt it. That's a minor quibble; the opening sequence is something else entirely. It is a brutal depiction of heretics (i.e., Protestants) being burned at the stake. While he elswhere opts for a sanitized version of Elizabethan life, Kapur's mise-en-scène here is graphically bloody, sooty, grimy, real. The scene's inclusion can be justified by only the flimsiest of pretexts; it is in effect being used for shock value, as a hook. But real people died, real people burned, once upon a time, and there is something spurious and dishonest about Kapur's lackadaisical treatment of them. ELIZABETH not only ignores the past, it exploits it.
The argument in favour of this approach may be that modernizing the material makes it more relevant: but the effect is precisely the opposite, for nothing has been learned. By refusing to deal with Elizabeth I in her own terms, by dealing with her solely in our terms, the movie is of no interest to us, here, now, in 1998, except as diversion. And it is, at times, a spectacular diversion, even if it is all overstatement. If it were a book, all the key passages would be underlined, with exclamation marks--but, oh my, what fine-looking exclamation marks they would be.
A Review by David Dalgleish (December 29th, 1998)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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