By Peter Brunette
Elizabeth is a powerful and moving, magnificently staged biography of the first British sovereign of that name. Set in the bloody and plot-ridden 16th century, the film details the rise to power of the 25-year-old illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII (illegitimate, that is, in the eyes of the Catholic Church), who was to take a realm debilitated by years of religious wars and, over the course of a 44-year reign, remold it into the most powerful and glorious country in the Western world.
Elizabeth was directed by Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, best known in this country for Bandit Queen, which, though the setting couldn't be more different, was also about a feisty young woman who asserts political control over a group of astonished men. Amazingly, Elizabeth is Kapur's first film in English, and it's probably his very lack of previous knowledge of the Elizabethan period that has enabled him to re-create it in such a fresh manner.
The title role is played by the soon-to-be very hot Australian actress Cate Blanchett, who was last seen in the rather lame Gillian Armstrong movie Oscar and Lucinda, but whose forthcoming films include Pushing Tin, a black comedy with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, and a film directed by Anthony (The English Patient) Minghella. She is perfect as the Queen who, over the course of her reign, borrows a leaf from Catholic Mary-worship to become "the Virgin Queen," a distanced icon for her courtiers and people.
The film contains the requisite love affair to keep a modern audience interested, in the person of Lord Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, played by Joseph Fiennes, who'll be seen later this year in another Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare in Love. Research reveals that, while little is known of Elizabeth's personal life, scholars agree that an affair with Dudley is a perfectly plausible surmise.
What's best about the film, however, is not the hot romance, but the coldness that lies at its heart. Taking a page from Roberto Rossellini's great 1966 film, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, Elizabeth details a specific political process as much as anything else, a process that enables the determined young queen to assert herself over male domination and to consolidate her rule. It also allows her to emerge as a legitimate feminist hero for the '90s.
Blanchett and Fiennes are backed up by a superb supporting cast consisting of Richard Attenborough as her adviser William Cecil, Geoffrey Rush as Francis Walsingham, who, as "the father of British intelligence," as he is known, becomes Elizabeth's henchman, and Fanny Ardant as Marie de Guise, the always-plotting mother of Elizabeth's chief rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.
The production is aided immeasurably by the photogenic quality of the twelve churches and castles in the north of England that were used for locations and which perfectly complement the chiaroscuro lighting effects and Kapur's accent on the visceral and the textured. His camera is always imaginative as well, and until she shines forth at the glorious end of the film in all her frontal iconicity, Elizabeth is continously seen through distorting glass or fluttering veils. The best visual effects of all are the dynamic use of closeups and an always moving camera, techniques that strongly recall an underappreciated French film about another female monarch, Patrice Chereau's Queen Margot. The language employed is an appropriately and delicately watered-down version of Shakespearese that gives the flavor of the period but is still understandable to a modern audience. Kapur is also good on the tiny details -- the grasping of a lady-in-waiting's hand at a fearful moment, the cacophony of musical styles when the Duc d'Anjou comes to pay court to the queen -- details that can surreptiously give heft to a film.
The many visual and aural techniques employed in this film may become bothersome to more austere viewers, but for the baroque-at-heart among us, they're a perfect counterpoint to the subtle, cold political process that we witness, in awe, unfolding before us.
