works, up to a point, as overloaded soap opera, then loses sight as poetic war ensues

Rating: 6/10 (9 April 2008)

I barely remembered the first film Elizabeth (though I remember still that I liked it, however without much enthusiasm to see it soon after again) before I decided, based on a few surprisingly good reviews, to seek out the 'sequel', which follows Queen Elizabeth in some of her most formidable and turbulent years in power. And it turns out to be... what I expected, with a couple of points of merit. It is, actually, not too much unlike the also recent The Other Boelyn Girl, and there's a commonality that will make some want to see it a lot more than others. The performances by the female leads are fantastic, and there's some male eye-candy for the more fashionable and iconoclastic characters (for the former, Cate Blanchett re-assumes her role, and for the latter we have Clive Owen here as Walter Raleigh, a handsome pirate- need to emphasize this again *handsome*), and it's beautifully designed. It rightfully won its costume Oscar, at the least.
But the director Kapur is not without his excesses, and isn't entirely sure which movie he would prefer more- perhaps history, as it would seem, doesn't discern the two sides. Elizabeth might quietly have a 'thing' for Raleigh, but she cannot ever show it, despite him being, in a perfect world as they say, the most promising prospect to help her conceive and continue on with kingdom of Britain. But there's also her most trusted assistant, played by Abbie Cornish, who is also smitten with Raleigh, and they end up marrying and having a child behind the Queen's back. There's a lot of tension, too, with the Queen's cousin Mary (Samantha Morton in maybe the best supporting role of the movie, which maybe isn't saying much), who wants to take the crown for herself. Her plot against her, as it turns out, is seen as a treasonous turn for the Spanish, and so they put forward their offense against the UK.
Now, for all that Kapur can do with the material, the best choice he does is to let the scenes of human romantic turmoil, repression, and the shortcomings of Elizabeth beside of her strengths, ring out for all their melodramatics are worth. That makes The Golden Age tolerable, even watchable in a guilty pleasure sort of way. But then when the big battle scenes at sea come, it turns into a mess. He just can't seem to direct those scenes without mucking it up with pretentious visual poetic-theatrics that bog down everything to a crawl. And because Kapur can't leave one side without the other, he's left with an enjoyable but turgid muddle on his hands, with a fiery and (color us shocked) complex Blanchett performance at the center. In fact, if you have any reason to see it at all that doesn't include an interest in costume/period pieces or old-school English history, see it for her.