The Prague Post
November 22nd, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre

Home » Archives » Night & Day

Epic staginess

It's Regina Redux as Blanchett flounces about as Elizabeth
Cinema Review | Search restaurants | Archives

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 21st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Going at history with a fork and knife. Abbie Cornish and Cate Blanchett in some late-Tudor intrigues.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Directed by Shekhar Kapur
With Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush, Abbie Cornish and Jordi Mollá

Nearly 10 years after Cate Blanchett first ruled the screen in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, the director and star are back with a new installment on the life of the virgin queen. But what was formerly serious pageantry has graduated into high camp.
The film begins with Burne-Jones inspired stained-glass windows featuring the dramatis personae like Pre-Raphaelite divinities. In fact, the entire film looks like it might have been designed by any member of that artistic brotherhood, with the result that, like a painting by Arthur Hughes or Rossetti, Elizabeth: The Golden Age sits throned between grace and garishness.
The film’s subtitle is the final reel’s promise. After Elizabeth has seen off the Spanish Armada and Mary Stuart, an amber glow suffuses Blighty to signal playwrights and poets to get cracking (undoubtedly the meat for Kapur’s next Tudor romp, perhaps to be titled Elizabeth: The Dowager’s Idyll or some such thing).
For now, though, we find the queen (Blanchett) with a few problems on her hands. The country’s Catholics are Jesuitically at work on her downfall, with plots being hatched between the captive Mary, Queen of Scots (the excellent Samantha Morton) and the inquisitors of Philip II’s Spain. Elizabeth does not want war, but soon realizes that she’s been caught in priestcraft’s spell.
Geoffrey Rush’s Walsingham is back to take care of the paperwork and torture necessary to run a nation. He is on the trail of the papal spies, and supplies the racks, axes and cautery that have always helped populate heaven.
Amidst this turmoil, Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) sails into Elizabeth’s affections. He’s recently dubbed a bit of far-off land as Virginia in her honor, and has come to present her with its treasures — tobacco and potatoes. Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s closest girlfriend, Beth Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish), catches the eye of Raleigh.
What follows is chronologically dumb but dramatic. The queen discovers that Beth and Raleigh have been dallying in palace passages and that, indeed, Beth is now pregnant. While she banishes her friend from court and Raleigh to the tower, Philip II is moving his massive navy toward the chalk cliffs. What’s a queen to do?
If you’re Blanchett, you seethe virginally while flouncing about in brocade. Lately, Blanchett has taken to becoming “theatrical” in films. Her Elizabeth is stentorian; she knows how to throw an impaling glance, and she declaims her lines to the point of frothing, in what Kundera would describe as “sacred flashes of hysteria.”
With her face blanched with ceruse, and moving through her palace as if someone had just yelled “fire,” Blanchett is pure ham, albeit a finely cured slab. But it does strike one as a top-notch drag act, even more so than Quentin Crisp’s go at Elizabeth in Sally Potter’s Orlando.
The script is of little help. It’s rhetoric ’n’ robes prose, occasionally lit with squibs. Perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious moment is when Elizabeth rides out to buoy her troops in breastplate, with her red mane of hair (perhaps harvested from Elizabeth Siddal’s grave) bravely flowing behind her. Her speech strains to be as robust and bardic as Henry V’s Agincourt speech, but it all comes off as the Globe’s Hal as transvestite.
Owen plays Raleigh as a manfully unbathed rakehell, Errol Flynn as rough trade. He swashes and buckles, and (as he also achieves in Shoot ’Em Up) smolders with sex.
Cornish and Rush are perfect props for Blanchett’s diva turn, though it’s interesting that this ever-so-English tale is populated with Aussies (just as Becoming Jane was crammed with Yanks). Apparently, every British actor is busy toiling at the Harry Potter mill.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age is mostly candied rubbish. Yet, like Pre-Raphaelite work, there’s something transfixing about epic staginess, and in that Blanchett and Kapur do not disappoint.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (21/11/2007):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Provokator
Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.