history as myth, and a good thing too

Rating: Null/10 (3 September 2000)

It's curious that "Elizabeth" has attracted so much flak for its screenplay's tendency to reinvent and mythologize the early history of Elizabeth I's reign, since treachery and fidelity, history and myth-making, are precisely what the film is about. As only becomes clear in the last few minutes (sort of spoiler alert!), the film is the history of an image - the famous public image of Gloriana, the virgin queen, powdered white and with a fright wig that makes her look halfway between a clown and a corpse, locked into a costume that restricts her movements to the ritualistic and barely human. How could any human being become reduced, or inflated, to that iconic status?
Kapur's film has a good deal of insight into the nature of the Tudor court, but its primary interest is less historically specific, more about the relationship between personality, celebrity and power. But the broad lines of the history are quite rich. There's an alternative myth of origins for English protestantism here, rather convincingly locating the psychological appeal of Elizabeth's church within, rather than outside, English Catholicism, by substituting the Virgin Queen for the Virgin Mary. And its analysis of the relationship between Tudor politics and Tudor sex, private and public lives, is subtle and pointed, rather in tune with contemporary academic approaches. There's little scholars need scorn, for all that a good deal of the details, the events, are as fictive as most of what you find in Tudor chronicles or the plays of Shakespeare based on them.
So as a knowingly contemporary work of historical imagination, it's more sophisticated than anything since Sally Potter's glorious, if drastically uneven, "Orlando" (1993). Unfortunately, like "Orlando", "Elizabeth" is patchy, sometimes cringe-worthy. Some of the contemporary nudges are unsubtle (a weakness shared by "The Madness of King George" (1994), where the anxiety to make past and present dance to the same tune can leave the film historically adrift, risking relevance to nobody living or dead). The soundtrack's late lurch from Elizabethan music into Elgar and Mozart's Requiem doesn't work at all, though you can see why director Kapur wanted to broaden the scope, to underscore (literally) how Elizabeth invents an English mythology - hence the Elgar. The acting is a mixed bag: while Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush are pillars of strength, there are some distractingly odd casting decisions, and Richard Attenborough is no better than usual. But anyone interested in the ongoing history of how film deals with history, and indeed how history gets made in the first place, should put this on their to-see list. Nice frocks, too.