Movieline
By Joshua Mooney
The box-office numbers indicate that, given a choice between two tales of late 16th-century England this year, you went for Shakespeare in Love over Elizabeth. Perhaps the latter smacked too much of dull history, too little of romantic charm. But if the seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture and Best Actress) didn't pique your interest, consider the woman herself: Elizabeth I. Under this legendary monarch, the Virgin Queen, England defeated the "invincible" Spanish Armada, became the leading world power, set its sights on the New World and experienced the Golden Age of the English language (which made such things as Shakespeare in Love possible). As for the movie Elizabeth, which depicts its subject's formative years, it's anything but dull. Indian director Shekar Kapur catapulted the conventions of period movies over the ramparts in favor of an entirely fresh, sometimes radical, consistently entertaining approach to what is, admittedly, a complex woman in a complex era. Holding the whole thing together is Australian Cate Blanchett, who gave what is to my mind the most seductive, refined and potent female performance of last year.
Kapur and screenwriter Michael Hirst transformed the dry facts of Holinshed's late 16th-century histories into a work of imagination in which Elizabeth's ascension to the throne is depicted as the ultimate girl's coming-of-age tale. The young Elizabeth's transformation into womanhood is set against the backdrop of a bloody, sexy, noirish story of intrigue that owes much to modern spy thrillers, not to mention The Godfather. Another antecedent might be The Lion in Winter, which transformed the musty legend of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine into a rollicking soap opera of royal manipulation, well-phrased invective and cut-throat politics. In one of those affronts to traditional history that's so cheeky it might just be right, Elizabeth's flesh-and-blood Virgin Queen is not only not a virgin, she's a lusty maiden who, even after she gets her crown, keeps right on doing it with her lover, Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare of Shakespeare in Love). With her empire split between Catholics and Protestants, and threatened by France and Spain, Elizabeth learns how to turn her inherent disadvantage - her feminity - into her most powerful weapon. Through sheer force of will, she effects her own metamorphosis from intimidated young woman to brilliantly fashioned icon ready for worship.
Blanchett's Elizabeth is fueled with a convincing inner strength that is all pale fire; in a role once considered for Nicole Kidman and Emily Watson, she delivers a career-making performance. As her lover, Fiennes is boyishly handsome, but not quite the stuff to captivate a woman of destiny (and daughter of Henry VIII). Geoffrey Rush, better here than in Shakespeare in Love, for which he was Oscar-nominated, is mesmerizing as Elizabeth's master of spies, a worldly, Machiavelli-spouting viper who teaches her the real cost of power. Christopher Eccleston strikes the right note of danger as the alternately brooding and swaggering Norfolk, a powerful noble who openly covets the trone. And French actress Fanny Ardant relishes the Joan Collins cut of her armor as Mary of Guise, bitch warrioress supreme.
Elizabeth was an intoxicating spectacle in theaters and it holds up on the small screen. Telling a story of real people, Kapur focuses on faces, not static tableaux, so his vision plays well in the more intimate format. And Blanchett's Elizabeth is a regal, commanding presence at any size.
