Elizabeth: The Golden Age (**3/4)

Yet another sequel, but they couldn’t call it Elizabeth II, because it’s still about England’s Elizabeth I, who is still played by Cate Blanchett, who is still as excellent as in the original. It’s 1585; no longer the young girl consolidating power, the queen is the unquestioned ruler during a time of trouble. Well, almost unquestioned. Elizabeth’s imprisoned cousin Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) was a potential rival to her throne and an inspiration for England’s Catholics, some of whom might have liked to depose the Protestant Elizabeth. From the exterior, there was Spain’s Catholic King Philip, who threatened to expand his empire.

The movie doesn’t delve deeply into the politics of the religious war going on inside England, an admittedly complicated subject, but a large chunk is given over to the plotting against the throne. I found some of that confusing, filled with characters of whom I lost track. More successful, on the whole, is the recounting of Elizabeth and her friendship/flirtation with roguish, but loyal Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). Still, there was something disconcerting about watching the course of the first movie play in reverse. There, she becomes a woman. Here, she is already a queen, as Blanchett’s fierce voice and regal presence makes clear from her first scene, but reverts into girlish self-doubt in the presence of Raleigh. (Despite makeup, Blanchett does look a tad youthful for a woman who was in her fifties during the events portrayed.) I don’t know about the true relationship of these figures, but I preferred the more assertive, self-assured ruler of the start. Does even the Virgin Queen fall into a pitable state in the presence of overwhelming masculinity?

Only the threat of the Spanish Armada, it seems, can rouse Elizabeth to leadership. This is still worth seeing if you enjoy historical dramas. But despite the return of screenwriter Michael Hirst and director Shekhar Kapur, like most sequels it impresses less than its forebear.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/11/07

The Queen (***3/4)

?  Director Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters), whose filmography has delved into seemingly all sides of the class divisions in Britain, depicts the top of the upper crust and how they reacted to the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Helen Mirren, whose previous role was as Elizabeth I in a TV movie, plays the titular Elizabeth II, and Michael Sheen the newly installed prime minister, Tony Blair. The script is by Peter Morgan, whose work is concurrently on view in The Last King of Scotland.

+  For the crown, the death of Diana represented an unprecedented quandary. Having divorced Prince Charles, she was no longer, technically, a royal. Nor were Elizabeth and, especially, her imperious husband Phillip, inclined to celebrate the life of someone they’d come to regard most uncharitably. Instead, they holed up in their country estate. The contrast between the young prime minister and the aging queen mirrors the gulf between the royals’ and the public’s view of the crown’s role in the age of celebrity. In other words, the people expected a gesture of grief to mirror theirs. I’ve never understood myself why an accident of birth should make someone worthy of all that attention, which put me in the odd position of relating, in this case, to the queen’s stance. Yet if I can’t say Frears made me

understand the depth of feeling engendered by the martyred princess, he does make it palpable. Mixing real footage with the fictional helps convey the genuine sadness felt by millions.

   Of course, a great deal attention will deservedly focus on Mirren, whose Elizabeth is a believable mix of the earthy (she drives her own Range Rover) and the reserved. Sheen is a pretty effective Blair, although in his earliest scene, meeting the queen, he seems such a Pee Wee Herman-esque pipsqueak that it seemed hard to believe this was a man who’d just won a landslide victory. Nonetheless, the movie winds up as a mash note to an emerging statesman, with only the queen’s comment in the epilogue alluding to Blair’s now-sullied reputation.

 - Just once or twice I thought the movie was slow as it inexorably leads toward the self-abnegation by the monarch.

= ***1/2 Not quite a political film, not quite a biographical one, this is a blend of character drama and cultural history lesson that made me interested in an episode I’d utterly ignored when it happened.

IMDb link