Finally got around to seeing Elizabeth: The Golden Age on Tuesday night. If you listen to the podcasts every week, you'll know I've been saying I'll see this movie for about three weeks. Now I'm wondering why I bothered.
No, that's not true. It was worth it to see Blanco the Wonder Horse swimming out of the burning Armada. There was no other reason for him to be in the film, mind you, except for the 26 seconds he gets on screen for his heroic jump and the shot of him swimming from underneath, but at least we got to see all of him.
Anyway, here's the review. I gave it 3 stars. 2 for the movie and one for the dog-paddling horse.
Cate Blanchett revisits her role in this follow-up to the 1998
film, Elizabeth, which charted the rise of, arguably, England’s greatest queen. As usual, Cate is spectacular, as are the supporting cast — Clive Owen as Walter Raleigh, Geoffrey Rush (wasted as Walsingham) and yet another Aussie actress, Abbie Cornish, as the queen’s favourite and Raleigh’s love interest, Bess Throckmorton.
This film gives the impression that is trying very hard to be Really Important and Very Profound. Instead it comes off as needlessly melodramatic and sometimes downright irritating. Director Shekhar Kapur seems to think the more important the scene, the more the audience benefit by witnessing it through a lattice, a fence, out of focus, or between two columns with half the scene obscured. Apparently, not being able to see something clearly will, of course, help you to know that something of Momentous Import is about to happen.
As for historical detail, well, they spelt Elizabeth right in the opening credits. That’s something, I suppose. The 55-year-old Elizabeth looks like she’s been worked on by the Extreme Makeover team, and seems to spend much of the film agonising about her love life (or lack thereof). The French-speaking Mary, Queen of Scots sounds like she’s come straight from a Scottish Housing Estate. They manage to get through the whole Spanish Armada episode in history without mentioning Francis Drake. Bessie Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish) married Raleigh 4 years after the Spanish Armada was defeated and he certainly wasn’t the hero of the battle. In fact, he wasn’t even there. I believe he was in Cornwall or Devon, somewhere, waiting for the attack that never came, because other naval heroes (not Walter Raleigh), actually saved the day.
You can’t fault the look of the film, or the performances of the actors. The costumes are fabulous, the feel of the film is quite authentic — no lighting a single candle, which then illuminates a cavernous throne room — and the torture scenes in particular, are stomach-churningly realistic. The tendency of the sun to shine brightly through convenient windows, however, every time Elizabeth pauses for a moment of regal reflection, stretches the friendship a tad. Particulalry when it happens during thunderstorms.
The film jumps around a lot between Elizabeth and the forces rallying against her, but this is OK because you know when you’re dealing with the Bad People (i.e. the Spanish and all other Catholics in the realm) because there are subtitles or they’re clutching prayer books and followed by chanting priests. Or they’re wearing red. Or they are followed by chanting priests wearing red. Or red dyers (I kept waiting for there to be a reason the Catholics kept meeting in the dye shop. And why the only colour they ever seemed to dye was red. Still don’t know).
The film is wonderful to look at, overly pretentious, melodramatic and ultimately dull. For anybody wanting to see a worthy homage to one of the world’s most brilliant women, well, you can’t. There’s a lattice in the way.
~ Read the rest of the reviews ~
You must have gotten the version WITHOUT all the overhead microphones, which kept jumping in and out of certain shots. (We saw the movie on opening night here in the states and my husband, who has worked as a soundman (though not a boom operator) thought this appallingly unprofessional) There were at least seven different instances of this that we caught. It was so profuse it became a cat and mouse game with the audience to spot when the next one would appear. Too bad because it really messed up what would have ultimately been some really nice scenes. (ie. Cate giving her big speech in full armor while on horseback). Why couldn't they have just spent the time to CG out the mics before sending out the reels??? We may be a small town in Vermont, but I think we should have gotten better than the second rate cut of the film that we did.
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