A Regal Arc

Rating: Null/10 (9 March 2014)

I watched Elizabeth again last night on TCM. I was shocked to realise it was almost twenty years old, but gratified to see it follows a classic structure.
As a writer, it must be an enormous challenge to write a historical screenplay and still make your main character dynamic, relevant, someone who changes.
Michael Hirst (The Tudors, The Vikings) does this splendidly in Elizabeth. When we first see her, she is a young long-haired princess gambolling in the countryside, excited to see the man she adores. She is laughing and happy, almost unaware of the burden of her destiny. In the final images, we see an austere and isolated monarch, in a rich and contrived Tudor interior, hair shorn and face whitened to an intimidating regal mask. There is no doubt that she is now a strong queen and leader in those last moments.
Watching Elizabeth again, it is interesting how the movie operates on the premise of choices, and how these shape a history and an individual. The choice between marriage and duty, Catholic or Protestant etc., are all played out in the story and are set up in the first few minutes of the film in compelling way.