Heartless and facetious hijacking of British history...

Rating: 3/10 (14 November 2019)

Those watching extra materials on the DVD of "The Favourite" from Greek-born (British-resident) Director Yorgos Lanthimos will be supplied with a breathtakingly honest if impertinent/arrogant vision of how the Director and others involved sought deliberately to cock a snook at/play fast and loose with costume drama as a genre ... and in the process British history.
This "reimagining" (NOT "like a BBC production" - as one of those featured facetiously put it) is EXACTLY what Lanthimos, Australian writer Tony McNamara and others achieved, but I had to watch the film to appreciate their "success", which is an acquired taste I ultimately failed to acquire. Interesting also the way in which the treatment of Anne and her reign here in some sense parallel that meted out to Victoria and HER reign in "Victoria and Abdul". A person who didn't know better would be inclined to wonder if there is a deliberate attempt to (try and) besmirch the reputations of our Queens, by way of sledgehammer ridicule.
Thanks to this review, others will have - should they choose - a better idea of what they are letting themselves in for by electing to watch "The Favourite", in advance of actually parting with their hard-earned cash.
While the camerawork (under Irishman Robbie Ryan) at times achieves artistry, the bullseye lens of which the makers are so proud bored and confused this viewer, if only serving to emphasise the deliberate effort made here not to lionise the past, and not to make history look attractive, or even especially real.
Fair enough (and indeed I have an imagination, am not a prude and do value diversity), but...
While the Hatfield House principal setting is such a rewarding location that it often achieves a satisfying "Dutch Interior" type feel (in spite of everything), much effort is made by one and all to ensure that this setting is steeped in a huge variety of offputting visual and audio stimuli assailing the watcher of the film. Wounds, ulcers, foul language, blood, vomit, toilet habits, oral sex, rape, mud, drunkenness, capriciousness, hitting, shouting, overindulgence, silly foppishness, humiliation of people and cruelty to animals are all on display.
Now those who know their history will be under no illusions that past times were crude in their way, and by no means obviously more "elegant" than the times we live in today. There was anyway still - in the early 18th century - a kind of understandable reaction to Puritanism of the 17th.
It is also more than conceivable that Queen Anne (here played by Olivia Colman) did indeed have a fully-fledged lesbian relationship with her favourite, the Duchess of Marlborough (a strong role for Rachel Weisz). Likewise Sarah's (aristocratic, but on hard times) cousin Abigail Masham (nee Hill) (played here by American actress Emma Stone with a faultless accent) really did exist, and really was another favourite of Her Majesty. So much of what is portrayed in the all-female triangle here might indeed have happened.
And men really were foppish back then.
But...
In the first place, Anne had tremendous health and other difficulties in her life, and while these are portrayed in near-excruciating detail, this is deliberately done callously and heartlessly - to the extent that I felt moved, and sorry for Anne, just once - at the moment when she took the rabbits from the cages and let them run around, making it clear that they were in some way substitutes for her 17 lost children. The makers claim that there IS sympathy for Her Majesty in their "black comedy" film, but I searched long and hard for the sympathy and found it only this once. (I also looked for the comedy, and found that elusive too). But anyway, it is true, painstaking genius of a kind to expunge all other sympathy for a sympathetic figure from a 2-hour movie.
Anne deserves a better, kinder fate than this!
A similar kind of process afflicts the portrayal of my country - the United Kingdom - a polity that actually came into being during the reign of Queen Anne, as conceivably the most earth-shatteringly important "invention" in the whole history of human civilisation. This does not appear in the film, and while the "glories" of Marlborough's victories in Europe cannot be ignored by it, they are also to some extent belittled and ridiculed, and that is fair enough. While those wars resulted in the construction of Blenheim Palace (a topic that does briefly make its appearance), and while that had a little bit to do with the coming into existence centuries later of one Winston Churchill, they need not concern us unduly in 2019.
Mores seriously, there is not a hint here of the country of creative genius and scientific and artistic assertiveness that was beginning to take shape during Anne's reign. There was a kind of mini Golden Age in those 12 years - as historians doing their own reassessment of history are increasingly telling us; and any form of even minimally straight or fair presentation of that truth strays so far from the intentions of this film's makers that there is obviously no chance that they would even allude to it.
Call that a pity if you will, call it an oversight, or elect to reinterpret the word "reimagining" as deliberate/cunning/manipulative/heavy-handed misrepresentation. It's your free choice as a viewer - actual or potential - to do that.