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Saoirse Ronan in Mary Queen of Scots. (Photo: Liam Daniel) |
This piece contains reviews for Mary Queen of Scots,The Favourite, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and At Eternity’s Gate.
The promise of a movie about the struggle between Queen Elizabeth I and her
Scottish cousin, Mary Stuart, who claimed her right to inherit the throne
of England and wound up with her head on an executioner’s block, is the
chance to see a dramatic clash between two charismatic actresses. But so
far it hasn’t worked out very well for the Elizabeths. In the 1971
Mary, Queen of Scots Vanessa Redgrave’s lyrical
performance as Mary made a far stronger impression than Glenda Jackson’s
Elizabeth (a role that she played later – and famously – on television),
and in the new version,
Mary Queen of Scots without the
comma, Saiorse Ronan’s Mary is pretty much the whole show. That’s not the
fault of Margot Robbie, who plays Elizabeth, but of Beau Willimon, who
wrote the screenplay (based on John Guy’s book
Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart), and the
director, Josie Rourke. They’ve chosen a dopey faux-feminist take on the
historical narrative in which it’s the manipulative men in the two queens’
lives who keep messing everything up. (As if you had to
transform
the conflict between two female monarchs into a feminist story!) That point
of view makes some sense for Mary, who is, at various times, at the mercy
of the whims and power grabs of her half-brother James (James McArdle), her
protector, Bothwell (Martin Compston), her homosexual husband, Henry
Darnley (Jack Lowden), his father, the Earl of Lennox (Brendan Coyle), and
the Protestant reformer-minister John Knox (David Tennant), who uses every
opportunity to proselytize against the Catholic Mary. (He manages to rev up
the Scottish populace against her “whorish” ways, though she scarcely gets
to sleep with anyone.) But the notion that Elizabeth, the most powerful
woman in the history of England – perhaps the most powerful monarch after
Cleopatra – has to buckle to a bunch of men who are in every way her
inferior is dumbfounding. This unfortunate reading of the part diminishes
Robbie, who is a fine actress (especially, I think, in
The Legend of Tarzan and
Z for Zachariah). When these two
monarchs finally meet, clandestinely, spark should fly. Instead Rourke
stages their tête-à-tête so that they’re not even facing each other until
halfway through the scene.