Word: queenly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Elizabeth imagines an England in anarchy, wracked with an embroiling religious conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. The Pope and his political counterparts in France and Spain are menacing the country, while the Catholic "Bloody" Queen Mary's public burnings of Protestants (presented in lurid excess in the opening of the film) only intensify the conflict. Into the middle of this maelstrom, Kapur places Elizabeth: young, innocent, with flowing hair and a penchant for dancing the volta. There may be something tenacious and unreadable in Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth, but Kapur doesn't help much, filming the young royal in pastel...
...wolves as savage and wily as the Mafia barons of The Godfather or the Japanese businessmen of Rising Sun, it wrings its hands somewhat too emphatically at Elizabeth's shrewd, momentous steps to transfigure herself into an emblem to lead her country. If Elizabeth's mutation into the Virgin Queen is the death of her womanhood, and happiness, as the film asserts, her sexuality--that which she renounces to rule the nation--ought to seem a little more respectable...
Tellingly, the most consistently exciting character in the film is not Elizabeth herself but her shadowy advisor Sir Francis Walsingham, played with relish and cold blood by the virtuosic Geoffrey Rush. Other politicos surrounding the Queen, like unrecognizable Christopher Eccleston as the traitorous Duke of Norfolk and Santa Claus-lookalike Richard Attenborough as earnest advisor Sir William Cecil, reveal their allegiances too broadly to become truly fearful or fascinating. By contrast, Rush's lurking performance leaves everything to the imagination: Walsingham whispers sweet Machiavellian nothings in the ear of the Queen between sessions slitting the throats of the boys...
Only in one masterful sequence at the center of the film, when Kapur pulls back the curtain on Elizabeth, rehearsing a momentous address to the bishops of England, does the Queen herself take center stage as a feminist vision of powerful womanhood--using intelligence, humor and finesse to spellbind her subjects with her own authority. For once, the film emerges from the shadow of its most prominent artistic antecedent: The Godfather. In this sequence, we watch as Elizabeth rewrites history, beginning her speech halting and uncertain, and slowly coming into her own as a power broker. This, finally...
...dingly dells of Titania and Queen Mab bordered on the badlands of sex, drugs and hallucination. The last two, especially, were never far away, and all three pervade Christina Rossetti's extraordinary narrative poem of the symbolic rape of a girl by the "Little People," Goblin Market. In painting the action was milder, but fairies were shown appearing in dreams to maidens whose sleep, as the phials by the bedside make clear, was induced by opiates. Then there were the magic mushrooms, which famously appear in Sir John Tenniel's illustration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--the stoned...