Not your mother's costume drama

Rating: 10/10 (4 May 1999)

This is not your mother's costume drama. From the very beginning, when the opening titles run over a psychedelic montage of religious iconography, you know that something different is happening here.and it isn't Masterpiece Theater. Dark and brutal, lurid and violent, this film unfolds like bloody flower. Religious intrigue, political machinations, sexual scheming--it's like an Umberto Eco novel. Cate Blanchett is an astonishing actress, a truly startling screen presence. She inhabits the body, mind and soul of the Virgin Queen with an ethereal grace underlain by steely resolve. Her portrayal of Elizabeth's inevitable transformation from a clear-eyed, idealistic girl with love in her heart to a coldly practical monarch who will be married always and only to England is heart-breaking--all the more so as the practicality is born only out of absolute necessity. Joseph Fiennes is dark and brooding, smolderingly sexual as the poor, sincere, doomed Lord Robert, who does all the wrong things for the right reason: his love for a girl who has become a woman. But that love is returned to him by a woman who has become a queen, and, as Robert himself says, "That love could corrupt the soul of any man." In the end, Robert's corrupted soul undoes them all.