Good drama but with some distractions

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2013)

"Elizabeth" is a frock movie but, thinking about it, I usually only hate frock movies set later than the sixteenth century so it was quite cool for me to see this one. Long gone are the days when we used to associate Queen Elizabeth 1st with the saintly Glenda Jackson or followed that train of thought that lead inexorably to the picture of her writhing naked on the floor of a train in Ken Russell's "The Music Lovers". For now Glenda Jackson is just another sad member of that Stalinist revisionist party, otherwise known as New Labour and it is time for a new face to play Queen E_1.
Cate Blanchett is an excellent choice for the role and in many ways she has similar facial characteristics to the young Glenda Jackson in that she can look quite beautiful in one shot but play plain or downright ugly in another. She can act too, so no problems in that department. Geoffrey Rush is excellent in the part of Walsingham as is Christopher Ecclestone as Norfolk. Elsewhere a cameo by Angus Deayton is disastrously naff and although Kathy Burke is good as Queen Mary, it is difficult to disassociate her from the character of Waynetta Slob. I'm sure that Richard Attenborough is a kindly old gent who does charitable works but I've never liked him as an actor and he has too big a part here. Using John Gielguid to play the pope was also completely unnecessary and distracting. So a mixed bag as far as casting is concerned; what about the film itself?
The director Shekhar Kapur said something to the effect that he is an outsider to British culture and therefore he was looking at 16th Century England as a strange and exotic foreign land. This vision comes through very clearly in the film and is both a strength and a weakness. You get a good sense of how alien these strutting peacocks and bizarre high-ceilinged drafty buildings are to the modern mind. At times it gets rather irritating too as he seems determined to film part of every scene through gauze or knobbly glass, or else he is perversely dedicated to showing everything from a high vantage point or from the vantage point of someone lying flat on their back in a medieval gutter. Mostly it is beautiful but with sufficient gimmickry to be distracting.
The story is an interesting one, with Queen E_1 being depicted as having a young lover and how, through the dirty business of becoming a politician, she loses her humanity and becomes the Virgin Queen. The central section in particular is very enjoyable but the director failed to observe one of my Rules of Modern Cinema i.e. make the film and then cut at least half an hour out of the finished product. The half hour that should go here consists of most parts of the first 20 minutes which leave you thinking they'll never get to her coronation, let alone the rest of the story, and the last 10 minutes when the transformation from warm-blooded woman to cold Virgin Queen was done far too quickly to carry conviction.
As for the feminist aspects I just don't remember enough from my school history lessons to say whether they are justified. Queen E_1 is usually seen as a very strong and effective ruler and I therefore think it is believable that she really did kick ass as depicted here, at least within the constraints of what was possible for a female monarch of the time. And probably male monarchs were equally constrained. Whether she really had a lover I don't know but it does make for an interesting film.
A good historical drama let down by weird visuals and weird casting decisions.