Elizabeth: The Golden Age

[rating:3]
Director: Shekhar Kapur
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen

It is rare to see a film with such a mesmerizing star as Cate Blanchett, directed with such authority and verve, so lavish in its settings and decoration and so epic in its scope and themes add up to quite so little as Elizabeth: The Golden Age. The bombastic, melodramatic epic is an unworthy sequel to 1998′s more intimate and charming Elizabeth, and yet it’s so well-made that it takes awhile to realize that, while it is magnificent at being what it is, what it is is just silly.

The difference between the two films is clearly illustrated in the choice of actors to play opposite the divine Blanchett. In the first, Joseph Fiennes is the queen-to-be’s playful lover, whose frustration at the distance the throne places between him and Elizabeth renders him a sputtering, ineffectual fop given to rages and outrages. He’s a putz, but a complex, interesting putz. A putz with a hint of nuance. By comparison, Clive Owen’s Walter Raleigh, in this sequel, is nothing but an unblinking stare of square-shouldered manliness. That is what you hire Owen for, it seems. Determined, unblinking stare for determined, unblinking stare, no actor working today does determined, unblinking stares like Clive Owen. Just as this film has no gray areas, neither does Owen. The closest he comes to self-doubt is wondering whether to make his unblinking stare of manliness more “brooding” or “smoldering.” One imagines him testing it in front of a mirror. For days.

Are we saying Owen is the worst actor of his generation? Not if Nicolas Cage still has a pulse. Which, actually, you couldn’t prove from his last two films. But we digress.

The difference between Elizabeth the first and Elizabeth the second is also, inescapably, a reflection of our time. The first film was made in the Clinton era, an era of wonkery, court intrigue and a certain inward focus on the kingdom, if you will. The sequel comes to us in the Age of Terror, in which good guys and bad guys are painted in broad brushstrokes—like they used a push broom. It’s kinda hard, as Spain’s wicked, black-clad King Philip II, plots to bring a dark age of Catholic brutality and intolerance (“The Inquisition, let’s begin / The Inquisition, look out sin!”) to England, not to see the allegory between this mustache-twirling maniac and, you know, the shadowy hordes of terrorists/insurgents/swarthy people we seem to find under every rock, sand dune and domestic phone call these days. The movie even helpfully tells us, in a note over the opening frames, that against the Papist might of Spain, England is the last bastion of free, independent thought in the world: “Only England,” we are told, “stands against Philip’s holy war.” So late in the movie (and reasonably reflecting history), Blanchett puts on a flight jacket and declares “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of a … no, wait. She’s wearing big shiny armor like Transformer Barbie, and giving a rousing speech about defending the nation from the horror of Osam—Philip. From the horrors of Philip.

The first film condensed and reworked the first decade of Elizabeth’s rule, from her ascension in 1559 to her defeat of the Northern Rebellion in 1569 (though the movie hardly makes it seem that ten years have passed—ten months, maybe). The movie follows Blanchett’s transformation from Princess Elizabeth, a lovely and spirited girl, into The Virgin Queen, iconic symbol of her nation. The Golden Age picks up the story about 25 years later, in 1585 and mashes together the three years between Mary Stuart’s execution for treason and the defeat of the Spanish Armada off England’s shores. Here we have the glorious Queen under seige, a monarch who has mastered the public face that so troubled her in the earlier film. She tells a hapless young suitor, a German duke, that as she sits at court, she pretends there is a wall of glass between her and her subjects, courtiers and visiting officials, through which they can see her, but never touch her.

Blanchett both recreates the Elizabeth of the first film and advances her, creating a real sense that 25 years on the throne have changed the fabled monarch. Owen’s ham-fisted manliness reignites a certain passion in the aging queen, and Blanchett spends the movie swinging from cool royal personage to hysterical, lovesick schoolgirl. She handles it all well, but as screenwriters William Nicholson and Michael Hirst pile melodramatic scene upon melodramtic scene, and director Kapur’s camera whirls about and peeks from behind pillars and in blurry mirrors, you sorta wish for a little restraint. Like in the slow-motion naval battle scenes, when Clive Owen stands romantically on the prow of a frigate, or a galleon, or a man o’war. It’s a ship, and he’s standing romantically in the soft gold light of sunset like he’d be “King of the world!” if only Kate Winslett would cosy up to him. And then there’s explosions, and underwater camerawork as big white horses and little black rosaries sink ponderously, meaningfully, into a sea that’s so clear you can smell the chlorine, and backlit in gold by the fires of war. Who would’ve thought the sequel to that nice little Elizabeth movie would feel more akin to 300?

Is the film without merit? Of course not. It looks great. It’s tightly edited and directed with dizzying flair. Dizzing literally, the way the camera is always doing laps around the actors. Costumes, great. Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush? Terriffic. Clive Owen? Handsome in a certain light, and he makes damn certain to always be in that light. Fealty to history? It gets the broad outlines right-ish, and some nice details, such as the very highly educated queen’s facility with foreign languages. Which, you know, is what makes or breaks your Grandiose Historical Epic. Speaking of which, the film really has a Gone With The Wind kind of epic unreality. David O. Selznick would’ve wet his pants watching this film. In a good way. The quick-cut war scenes actually have the feel of those old Hollywood epics where characters in period costume walk around little studio castle sets saying things like, “Your majesty, we must prepare for the worst!” If you let yourself get caught up in the classic cheesiness of it, it blunts the bombast and becomes amusingly retro.

Elizabeth. The earlier movie guarantees the derisive “chick flick” stamp, and the heavily ratcheted violence—Now With Extra Torture!—is sure to please the fellas who’d rather be home watching football. Like Solomon chopping babies in half (the sort of thing you half expect in this movie’s darker moments) it’s a compromise in which no one quite wins.

Tags: drama, historical