Elizabeth: The Golden AgeDirector: Shekhar Kapur. Screenplay: William Nicholson, Michael Hirst. Cinematography: Remi Adefarasin. Film editing: Jill Bilcock, Andrew Haddock. Production design: Guy Dyas. Music: Craig Armstrong, A.R. Rahman. Producers: Tim Bevan, Jonathan Cavendish, Eric Fellner. With: Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush, Samantha Morton, Abbie Cornish, Rhys Ifans, Jordi Mollà, John Shrapnel, Susan Lynch, Penelope McGhie, Robert Cambrinus, Eddie Redmayne, Adrian Scarborough, William Houston, Steven Loton, Martin Baron, Steven Robertson, Tim Preece, Jeremy Barker, George Innes, Adam Godley, Kirsten Coulter Smith, Kelly Hunter, Christian Brassington, Tom Hollander, David Threlfall, David Robb. UK/France. 113 min. 2007.
By David Sterritt
Cate Blanchett first played the Virgin Queen in the 1998 costumer “Elizabeth,” which also featured Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham, her aristocratic henchman. Both are back, along with director Shekhar Kapur and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin, for this unofficial sequel, which picks up roughly where the earlier film—about the rise of Elizabeth I to the English throne and the early period of her sovereignty--left off. The main storylines involve the growing hatred of her Protestant reign by King Philip II of Spain, a staunchly Roman Catholic ruler; the tensions between Elizabeth and the imprisoned Mary Stuart, a k a Mary, Queen of Scots, regarded by some as England’s rightful monarch and possibly linked to an assassination scheme that Sir Francis defeats with unintended and unwelcome consequences; and the Queen’s crush on Sir Walter Raleigh, who’s returned from the Americas with Indians and tobacco to show off.
Kapur has become a director of strong imagination and great technical panache. Returning here to a subject he knows well, he parlays a string of vivid performances, plus powerful support from Adefarasin’s camerawork and razor-sharp film editing, into a picture containing little in the way of realism but a great deal in the way of Hollywood-style splendor and motion-picture mythmaking. Blanchett is genuinely regal as the eponymous heroine and Rush is exactly right as Walsingham, cruel and calculating in one scene, proffering heartfelt repentance to his monarch in another. Clive Owen is generally persuasive as Sir Walter, although his handsome looks and alluring demeanor are too picture-perfect to be quite credible. Also first-rate are Abbie Cornish as Bess, a lady-in-waiting who abuses her royal namesake’s confidence without really meaning to; Jordi Mollà as King Philip, a mostly unsympathetic sort whose grief at the destruction of the Spanish Armada is unexpectedly real and touching; and most of all Samantha Morton as Mary Stuart, who becomes a strikingly complex character despite the very limited screen time Morton has to work her magic.
The history set forth in the screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst is no more trustworthy than that of most cinematic extravaganzas with period themes, although Hirst is something of a specialist, having scripted the “Elizabeth” of 1998 and other historical dramas. (The routing of the Armada is downright bogus, drenched in action-movie clichés.) Nor need we take the story’s personal psychology as particularly true or perceptive; the Queen’s role in this epic is to be queenly, aside from a few moments of movie-type emotionality, mostly connected with Sir Walter’s presence or absence. Veracity and psychology aren’t the points in a picture that unabashedly values spectacle and momentum above all else. These it delivers in an abundance that would have pleased Her Majesty herself. It should please many moviegoers too.
