The new Elizabeth will give a lot of pleasure to conspiracy theorists and romantics. It turns Tudor statecraft into a branch of marriage-bureau politics. Whom will the Virgin Queen wed? The climax produces the answer we all know from the history book: "England". But it provides a grand finale for Cate Blanchett, as the queen, to cut off her auburn hair, daub paint and paste on her cheeks, pile finery on her back and emerge as a living Tudor waxworks.

Blanchett thus subscribes to the Bette Davis formula for royal reigns: "empowerment without pleasure". The loneliness of the absolute monarch whose only connection with men is boxing them on the eardrums if they get too uppity, as Bette did, or reducing them somewhat in size if they attempt to go over her head by depriving them of their own.

Fortunately, as some wicked tongue once said of Doris Day's screen persona, we get to know Blanchett's queen before she is a virgin. Joseph Fiennes, looking warmer to the touch than his more famous brother, the English Patient, is the young queen's squeeze. Vincent Cassel, the Franco-Swiss actor, plays an unsuitable French suitor. He comes unstuck when pressing his suit because he lets the queen see him ironing his frock, so to speak. This episode of girlish cross-dressing is so broadly played and vulgar that it unbalances the story for a bit and isn't helped by subtitles of the Carry On Liz variety.

Kathy Burke plays Queen Mary as if Lewis Carroll's Red Queen were on the throne and baying for blood. But the rest of an eclectic cast - which includes football star Eric Cantona as a foreign envoy playing a deft away game - mingle deviousness with decorum. The latter may have been assisted by the magnificent ruffs of their court dress, a fashion that reminds the wearers how uneasily their heads sit on their necks in this nervous society.

Christopher Eccleston, as the Duke of Norfolk, loses his head; Richard Attenborough, as Sir William Cecil, keeps his; and, best of all, Geoffrey Rush uses his as the spymaster (and closet gay) Sir Thomas Walsingham. John Gielgud is a papal makeweight.

Elizabeth is directed by Shekhar Kapur, whose Bandit Queen permitted him a dry run a few years ago with another female autocrat who brought her government to its knees. Blanchett only brings her courtiers to that posture. The colours are richly, darkly melodramatic. But panache is not quite enough to pull the episodic script smoothly together. A firmer production hand was needed to impose a style on the story.

Without an actress like Blanchett, a sure challenger for Vanessa Redgrave's crown, this court would have looked like a conventional Royal Academy group portrait. Blanchett, at the right moments, gives it the strength of a primitive.