Elizabeth
Director: Shekhar Kapur. Cast: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes, Christopher Eccleston,
Richard Attenborough, Fanny Ardant, Kathy Burke, Kelly MacDonald, John Gielgud, Eric Cantona, Vincent
Cassel. Screenplay: Michael Hirst.
Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth is both something borrowed and something new. If you have seen both
movies, you cannot help but observe how loyally Elizabeth follows the structure of The Godfather, as closely as Todd Haynes' Velvet
Goldmine apes Citizen Kane or Gus Van Sant's Psycho
follows, well, Psycho. We cannot trust anyone in Elizabeth, even the Queen herself, who
performs some about-faces and unforeseen acts of willpower that earn her the title of Her Majesty.
If the film is not quite so imperial or impressive as this peerless figure, we can hardly blame it.
Elizabeth begins with an intentionally stomach-turning sequence in which three defiant Protestants
are burned at the stake by officers of the staunchly Catholic Queen Mary (Kathy Burke, of Dancing at Lughnasa). Mary's court is a dark, damp, and spooky domain,
where the Queen sits perspiring and scowling on her throne, and a seeming batallion of advisors and
defenders orbit around her; an old, wrinkled dwarf who sits at the Queen's feet seals her visual
approximation of Jabba the Hutt. We should not, however, rush to name all—or perhaps any—of the men and
women who surround the Queen as "advisors or defenders." What advice they dispense is at least as likely
to serve their own interests as her own. A few of them seem interested in defending Mary's throne if only
because it simplifies the project of plotting their own succession to the crown. Chief among these
self-interested satellites is the Duke of Norfolk, played by Jude's Christopher Eccleston in a turn
that melds a lustful passion for power with a steel-trap intelligence that knows just how to seize it.
Given all of these on-site conspirators, it seems laughable that Mary's biggest anxiety springs
from a flaxen-haired maid who dances the valse far off in England's rural fields. Such is our first
impression of Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth, and if the actress' presence does not immediately quiver
with potency, it is because Elizabeth has not yet acquired her stately, resolute magnificence. Indeed, she
has not needed to. She spends her days in exile from the castle of her half-sister Mary, idling pleasantly
with a small coterie of friends and reciprocating the furtive, tender attentions of Robert Dudley. Joseph
Fiennes' presence in that role, especially with Eccleston's baby-blue peepers and blazing talent right
there on screen to remind you of his brother Ralph, comes across as rather limp and unmemorable, a rare
lapse in the film's otherwise expert casting.
Norfolk convinces Mary that recent murmurs of mutinous antagonism around the palace are, if not directly
fueled by agents of Elizabeth, then at least allowed to survive because Elizabeth's very existence gives
hope to those factions who agitate for a Protestant ruler. Elizabeth is summarily hauled off to prison,
but through a surprising course of events manages both to stave off her execution and, to no one's
surprise more than her own, receive a coronation as Queen of England. History assures us of her triumphant
work as monarch, but what director Kapur and scripter Michael Hirst want to show us is how fragile was
Elizabeth's hold on the crown, how deep-seated and clever the forces of opposition, and how crucial the
need for advisors and informants while this rural maid attempted to control a state beseiged by religious
division and external threat.
As a filmmaker, you can hardly miss with a story like this, which arrives in modern hands already
rigged-up with scandal, intrigue, counter-spying, and sexuality. As the film makes clear, without
a hint of tawdriness, Elizabeth's legendary virginity was as politically savvy but factually spurious a
notion as, well, the marital felicity of Bill and Hillary. The signature achievement of Elizabeth,
however, is the rigor with which it translates this story out of the pages of history and into a lush
visual world that is almost overwhelming in its dark beauty; like the pink tongue of a Venus flytrap, the
rich golds and maroons of John Myhre's sets and Alexandra Byrne's costumes beguile the eye without ever
dispelling the air of carnivorous peril. Their aura of danger even becomes literal in a scene where a
character is killed by poison administered to a dress; then again, another character is doomed when her
clothes are lasciviously removed in a rare moment of recklessness. Gowns and get-ups quickly become one
of those things, it seems, that you can't live with and can't live without.
Digression finished. On a more skeptical note, Kapur's conception of Elizabeth's look is also, to
an extent, a smoke-and-mirrors game that deploys visual showmanship in an attempt to hide
the stagey talkiness and rote pattern of its scenes. Most often, two characters who may or may not be
allies—they are usually both—speak with necessary but evident restraint their divergent views and heated
opinions. Kapur and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin can think of few more innovative strategies for
delivering these confrontations than to alternate between two actors in close-up. Their proclivity for
starting scenes with swooping tracking shots and elaborate overheads does not disguise the talking-heads
mode in which most of these scenes operate. The texture and design of the costumes, unsurprising in their
richness since Byrne also dressed Branagh's Hamlet, are an economical and smart way to give the
illusion of opulence, even to flesh out characters, when the tightness of a budget was probably strongly
felt. Even so, the careful or expressive use of a camera would have cost nothing, but Elizabeth
cannot match its production principles with as much force or eloquence of photographic vision.
As I have mentioned, the vision that Kapur rather seems most intent on mimicking is the operatic elegance
of The Godfather. His pursuit of that model extends to a climactic, familiar sequence in which some
avenging angels of the existing power regime (Elizabeth's servants now rather than Michael Corleone's)
execute some key enemies in a few shots that Kapur intercuts with scenes of a church ceremony. To
think on the analogy between the English monarchy and the 20th-century American gangster is provocative
even when the stylistic copycatting seems forced or uncreative. More memorable are those scenes like those
of the Protestant pyre or a silent, slow track over a field of soldiers killed in battle, or the painterly
scene of coronation which, in evoking David's image of Napoleon's self-crowning, suggests that Elizabeth
herself will become as powerful a figure, as charismatic and commanding, and occasionally as ruthless.
Like the film itself, Blanchett's presiding performance is constituted of individually striking moments
that fail only to build a consistent momentum. We recognize by the film's conclusion that Elizabeth is a
very different and more self-determining figure than the tremulous damsel we beheld at first, and
Blanchett's playing of critical events—her discovery that a military campaign has incurred huge loss and
discredit for England, her defiant posture of independence before an assembly of bishops—hews closely to
the political import of each scene without denying them a credible dose of emotion.
At the same time, however, Blanchett's presence remains, as in Gillian Armstrong's extraordinary Oscar and Lucinda, an eccentric and interesting one that lacks much interior
thread of personality. That aspect actually worked to her advantage in Oscar and Lucinda,
because both of the title characters were relentless oddballs whom the story deliberately put forth as
loosey-goosey collections of strange behaviors, sudden outbursts, and jerky twitchings. Elizabeth
follows a more standard arc of escalating tension, but Blanchett remains an actress more of
moment-by-moment flair than of sustained, expansive force. I would love to have seen what Tilda Swinton
of Orlando and Female Perversions might have done with the
part, but Blanchett's work is admirable and smart, savorable also for the hint it gives us of how great
she will be in the future.
If only the whole film were as unique and magisterial as the kabuki-inspired end sequence that sees
Elizabeth almost literally "take on" the persona of indomitable, super-human strength for which history
would always remember her. The film's shortcomings often ride piggy-back on its virtues, and even after
two viewings, it is neither a vital revisionist biography or an awkward, unsatisfying disappointment.
Elizabeth's brilliant flashes and its derivative undercurrents make it an interesting picture if
not always a vibrant one, an exciting generator of ideas which it does not always take to their fullest or
most cinematic extent. I like and admire Elizabeth, but I also hold back from a full engagement or
rapt involvement with the picture. Maybe no chronicle of this extraordinary woman can ever be as
show-stopping as the Queen was herself, but happily Elizabeth's vision succeeds just a bit
more often than not. Grade: C+
- Academy Award Nominations and *Winners:
- Best Picture
- Best Actress: Cate Blanchett
- Best Cinematography: Remi Adefarasin
- Best Art Direction: John Myhre
- Best Costume Design: Alexandra Byrne
- Best Original Score (Drama): David Hirschfelder
- *Best Makeup
- Golden Globe Nominations and *Winners:
- Best Picture (Drama)
- Best Director: Shekhar Kapur
- *Best Actress (Drama): Cate Blanchett
- Other Awards:
- National Board of Review—Best Director: Shekhar Kapur
- Golden Satellites—Best Actress (Drama): Cate Blanchett; Best Costume Design: Alexandra Byrne