Queen for a Day

Gilded meets "Golden" in Shekhar Kapur's kitsch-prone bio.  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Some would say this is the way Hollywood used to make period movies.

The Downside: There's probably a very good reason why they're not made that way anymore.

    One word you're going to hear a great deal in anything anyone writes about Elizabeth: The Golden Age is "opulent."  This is indeed a movie that enjoys its flourishes; its stately sets, its linen-and-lace wardrobe that seems to change with the frame.  Like director Shekhar Kapur's previous two American movies there is a love here for all that is flowing, radiant, and most of all Anglican.  In 1998 he came out with Elizabeth, his fetching retelling of the life and mythology of the "Virgin Queen" who carried England out of poverty and social despair and put it on track to become one of the greatest empires in the world.  Film biographies rarely tolerate, or see the need for, sequels, but when's life spans such monumental occasions as the Anglo-Spanish War and the rise of Shakespeare, perhaps exceptions should be considered.

    But not like this.  Elizabeth was a likeable project, owing more towards it phenomenal set of actors and a director who easily fell in with the crowd when the pageantry of Elizabethan England briefly came back in vogue at the cinema.  The speculation, though, that Elizabeth was a forgotten gem that was lost in the rush to crown Shakespeare in Love is a bit effete.  Acting aside, Elizabeth came off feeling like a well-produced fan journal, a movie so in love with its central personality it couldn't stand to observe her outside the light of nostalgic history.

    And now along comes The Golden Age, Kapur's recount of the latter years of Elizabeth's life, after her ascension to the throne and into the time in which her war of wills with the imprisoned Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) led to the enragement of Catholics throughout Europe, especially in Spain where King Phillip II personally took up the mantle to depose her from the throne and restore a Catholic monarchy.  It all sounds heady, which makes Kapur's 50-cent handling of these ten-dollar themes all the more tragic.  The Golden Age is a head-on collision between historical enlightenment and pure old-age Hollywood corn pone.  And unfortunately, the corn pone wins out.

    Both of Kapur's films are guilty of presenting a more than generous slice of the revisionist pie, particularly when they draw Elizabeth (Cate Blanchette- as sturdy as ever) as a balm to a time when England was ripping itself apart at the seams between Catholics and Protestants- a kind of new age pluralist leader.  The fact that Elizabeth upheld the Protestant Revolution in England to the detriment of her Catholic subjects (participating in mass became a jail-able offense) was glided over in Elizabeth and completely forgotten here, especially by screenwriters who have her saying "I will not punish my people for their beliefs."

    Such things might have been the stuff of post-modernist trivia, much as how the real pesky details about William Wallace's life were gladly forgotten by those praising Braveheart, if only Elizabeth: The Golden Age didn't feel so dramatically immature.  Its primary triangle centers on Elizabeth, the woman who has given up love (and in the movie's ceaseless metaphor, all things normal and human) to be the perfect ruler of her people, a perky and dutiful member of her court entourage named Liz (Abbie Cornish) who falls for the charms of the wily Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), thus unleashing a torrential regal hissy-fit on Elizabeth's part that feels at odds with a movie that is supposed to be about nobility and sacrifice.  Not all of the film's fatal blows come from here, but it's easy to see how a workable movie could have been made if the love triangle had been trashed and the whole film reworked from the ground up.  Much of the dialogue here, whether it's Raleigh swooning Elizabeth with tales of his adventures, or the catty back-and-forth between Elizabeth and Liz which sounds more High School Musical than Elizabethan court, rings contemporary and tin ear.

    There's every indication of Kapur wanting to make The Golden Age the widescreen-worthy epic Elizabeth never was.  Now that his plate holds Elizabeth standing firm against an invading Spanish army and the sea battle which decimated the Spanish Armada, the ambition for the sweep of, say, Ridley Scott's finally re-mastered Kingdom of Heaven, is sought after, but never realized.  In its stilted second half The Golden Age suffers from a choppy and at times rambling pace which is how I can only guess how Kapur masks the defeat of the Armada as the decisive blow that ended war with Spain, rather than the reality of two more decades of warfare which would leave England broke, bleeding, and begging for peace with Spain.  This is indicative that The Golden Age became the victim of studio-ordered trigger-happy editors fearful of anything approaching the 3-hour mark, although unlike Kingdom of Heaven which was literally reborn with its own director's cut, in this case said editors might have done audiences a favor by sparing them even more heaping gobs of claptrap.  The wartime special effects aren't going down in any books, with the army Elizabeth delivers her horseback rally to looking like- well, a bunch of guys in a line wearing armor- and the battle with the Armada is non-rousing mix of CGI and soundstage sets.  You want to know how quaint it is- it even turns explorer Raleigh into Errol Flynn, swinging from ropes from one ship to another as the battle ensues (the fact that he does so without a dagger between his teeth is probably just an oversight).

    What kind of movie is Elizabeth: The Golden Age trying to be?  It's an unabashed celebration of English colonial bygone, and in the same attraction to phony cheese wants to be a compelling love story, too.  The intrigue angle, with agents of Spain (you can tell who they are- most of them are wearing black) conspiring to bring the queen down, reveals a certain affinity for- The Godfather.  If, in the original, the sweep of conspirators by Elizabeth's aide-de-camp Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) reminded you just a little of Michael Corleone's purging of the rival families, then there's a moment here that'll make you wonder why Rush doesn't just come out and say, "I know it was you, Fredo."  This clanging of so many intentions, when simply sticking to the historical script may have been better, leaves The Golden Age empty and aimless.

    What both movies have always gotten right is Blanchette, and as strong as she is here she's been rewarded for much better in the past, leaving any potential Oscar nods a cursory affair.  Rush is a good actor, but now Walsingham is less of a Machiavellian believer than a generic hatchet man willing to torture and kill for Queen and Country.  And in the last of the roster of professionals done in by a lousy script, Owen gets the lion's share of embarrassing dialogue which he grins and bears while he, presumably, counts the minutes until he's back in his element in Sin City 2.  These are the kinds of distractions (or delusions) The Golden Age lives and dies by- the costumes, the almost beat-your-head-in orchestral splendor, and the names of actors who should tear material like this up if only it was done right.  This isn't the pits when it comes to costume drama (anyone remember Christopher Columbus: The Discovery?), but it isn't the story of Elizabeth I, nor is it any story removed from a world that is scripted and tinted in an uninteresting rose.  C-