Elizabeth

Plot synopsis:
In 1558, Catholic Queen Mary dies of a uterine tumour. Mary's Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, under house arrest for conspiracy charges, is freed and crowned the Queen of England.
As briefed by her adviser William Cecil, Elizabeth inherits a distressed England besieged by debts, crumbling infrastructure, hostile neighbours and treasonous nobles within her administration, chief among them the Duke of Norfolk. Cecil advises Elizabeth to marry, produce an heir, and secure her rule. Unimpressed with her suitors, Elizabeth delays her decision and continues her secret affair with Lord Robert Dudley while Cecil appoints Francis Walsingham, a Protestant exile returned from France, to act as Elizabeth's bodyguard and adviser.
Mary of Guise lands an additional 4,000 French troops in neighbouring Scotland. Unfamiliar with military strategy and browbeaten by Norfolk at the war council, Elizabeth orders a military response, which proves disastrous when the younger, ill-trained English forces are defeated by the professional French soldiers. Walsingham tells Elizabeth that Catholic lords and priests intentionally deprived Elizabeth's army of proper soldiers and used their defeat to argue for Elizabeth's removal. Realizing the depth of the conspiracy against her and her dwindling options, Elizabeth accepts Mary of Guise's conditions, to consider marrying her nephew Henry of France.
To stabilize her rule and heal England's religious divisions, Elizabeth proposes the Act of Uniformity, which unites English Christians under the Church of England and severs their connection to the Vatican. In response to the Act's passage, the Vatican sends a priest to England to aid Norfolk and his cohorts in their growing plot to overthrow Elizabeth. Unaware of the plot, Elizabeth meets Henry of France but ignores his advances in favour of Lord Robert. William Cecil confronts Elizabeth over her indecisiveness about marrying and reveals Lord Robert is married to another woman. Elizabeth rejects Henry's marriage proposal when she discovers he is a cross-dresser and confronts Lord Robert about his secrets, fracturing their idyllic affair and banishing him from her private residence.
Elizabeth survives an assassination attempt, whose evidence implicates Mary of Guise. Elizabeth sends Walsingham to secretly meet with Mary in Scotland, under the guise of once again planning to marry Henry. Instead, Walsingham assassinates Guise, inciting French enmity against Elizabeth. When William Cecil orders her to solidify relations with the Spanish, Elizabeth dismisses him from her service, choosing instead to follow her own counsel.
Walsingham warns of another plot to kill Elizabeth, spearheaded by the priest from Rome carrying letters of conspiracy. Under Elizabeth's orders, Walsingham apprehends the priest, from whom he learns the names of the conspirators and a Vatican agreement to elevate Norfolk to the English crown if he weds Mary, Queen of Scots. Walsingham arrests Norfolk, and executes him and every conspirator except Lord Robert, whom Elizabeth allows to live, as a reminder to never be blinded by romance again.
Drawing inspiration from the divine, Elizabeth cuts her hair and models her appearance after the Virgin Mary. Proclaiming herself married to England, she ascends the throne as "the Virgin Queen".

Tags: murder, violence, intrigue, flashback, romantic, historical

Review:
The Academy Awards ceremony of 1999 angered many people: Shakespeare in Love, albeit a very smart and funny film, robbed the superior Saving Private Ryan of the Best Picture Oscar; Roberto Benigni beat Edward Norton in the Best Actor category (though it was the Italian star's behavior, rather than his performance, that irritated those attending the event); and Gwyneth Paltrow, who wasn't actually bad in Shakespeare, walked away with the Best Actress award, depriving Cate Blanchett of the recognition she should have received for her revelatory work in Elizabeth.This film, the first in what the director hopes will be a trilogy (the second installment was released in 2007), covers the early years of Elizabeth I's reign, from her harsh upbringing to the decision to call herself "the Virgin Queen".
And what a story: the thriller aspect aims to please viewers who find the genre a bit lacking in the tension department, whereas the Queen's doomed love affair with Joseph Fiennes' Earl of Leicester (a plot element to which the BBC miniseries from 2005, starring Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons, is a sort of sequel) is the polar opposite of the sanitized, passionless romantic tales that tend to feature in other period films.Good-looking technique and strong storytelling would, however, be useless if the title role wasn't played by an equally great actress, and Pakur found the perfect Elizabeth in Blanchett: an odd choice she may have seemed (she was a complete unknown in Hollywood prior to being cast in this movie), but the performance she delivers is nothing short of astonishing.
And Elizabeth did whisper Robert Dudley's name on her deathbed The movie is an imaginative interpretation of the way that things could have beenShekhar Kapur's film explores the instabilities of her reign, and the absolute horror and terror that surrounded the early part of her royal office without neglecting her relationship with her terminally ill sister So it's a glimpse of her girlhood into statehood, and the shedding that occurs, with the people who expended in her life along the way The film shows Elizabeth growing up in an incredibly unstable, tumultuous environment But she's an absolute survivor...
Someone who has got no solid ground on which she walks So one minute she's a bastard, the next minute she's a princess, then one moment she's an illegitimate daughter, then she's a queen And it's a very relevant period of her life, because she was 25 when she became a female monarch There are four men in Elizabeth's life and all have quite different influences on what it means for a young woman to run the country so young, given that she comes to the throne under very difficult political circumstancesThere's Sir Cecil (Attenborough) who's from an older regime giving her the traditions and the conventions that are the most orthodox; Sir Francis (Geoffrey Rush) Elizabeth's great spy master, very astute, almost puritanical and rather dry bureaucrat; Robert Dudley (Fiennes) with whom the film suggests that she has quite a passionate, private relationship; and Norfolk (Eccleston), a major rival who doesn't regard that she is suitable to rule his England The motion picture succeeds in developing Elizabeth's change and, basically, locks off parts of herself, and dehumanizes herself in order to wield her power among men.
Pure Pacino.If you shimmy past the slightly silly inclusions of the likes of Eric Cantona (the IKEA School of Acting) and Angus Deayton, and the fact that Dickie Attenborough (plays a fussy sidekick who sniffs the Queen's bedsheets and claims, "her body belongs to the State") is starting to resemble an Ewok, the acting is otherwise splendid.Cate Blanchett not only resembles the great lady, but imparts her with enormous affection (her love of Lord Dudley, played by Fiennes, is tenderly dealt with) and delivers her lines with a steely intelligence, "I do not see why a woman must marry at all" and "I'm no man's Elizabeth" .
Certainly acknowledged by the Oscars garnering 7 nominations, Shekhar Kapur's intimate portrait of a young Elizabeth further expands the modern view on a distant monarch, whose maturing reign as well as taming nature continued to dazzle the 20th century viewers.Presented here by a superb cast led by Golden-Globe winner Cate Blanchett, early Elizabethean era turmoil and upheaval are captured brilliantly.
Yet just as England learns to wake up from the medieval dream, Elizabeth learns the bitterness of betrayal as she looks to Sir Francis Walsingham (Jeffrey Rush)'s counsel.Focusing on Elizabeth's subtle changes of phase from fire to ice at a distant in the midst of a grander panorama beautifully shot, the audience gradually distinguishes her footsteps from the shedding of innocence to a tough ruler that dares to strike first against her enemies, to ultimately become the Virgin Queen to reign above all men..
She should have won the Oscar in 1998.Terrific performances from the other principal actors, excellent costume/art direction and cinematography, a good script (if you can relax any standards of strict historiography you might have, if any) and well-paced direction and editing make for a terrific period piece.I loved this movie and raved about it for weeks afterward..
Cecil was not the milksop portrayed in the movie.Third, many of the cast looked like members of a 1990's Los Angeles street gang instead of characters from 16th century England.I believe the high overall ratings given the film are a result of ignorance of history..
I think that trying to catch the conscience of a queen, to make an illustrious historic figure come to life is far more difficult than playing William Shakespeare's (fictitious) love interest.It was my humble opinion, and I wanted to share it with other IMDB users..
This is one of the worst films I have ever seen and one of only three ever that I have almost walked out of!Shekar Kapur's Bollywood style may be ideal for an Indian story like Bandit Queen, but here it comes across as pulling out all the lighting and camera cliches in the business.Elizabeth has one of the most fantastic casts ever assembled - and they're all awful (with the possible exception of Cate Blanchett and John Gielgud - who in any case only has a 30 second non-speaking part)!
While, the evil Duke of Norfolk plots to put himself and Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne, Elizabeth's supporters rush around trying to find her a suitable international king.The crux comes when she declares she is only interested in her English lover, Lord Robert Dudley.
Some curious casting decisions undermine a few of the characters - working class mainstay Kathy Burke moves to the opposite end of the social spectrum to play Queen Mary, Brit comic Angus Deayton has an unnecessary cameo, while Eric Cantona seems an odd choice, although his performance seems adequate.As to the main characters, Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) is well charted from gamboling youth to ice-hard queen.
I felt like reaching into the screen and asking why certain scenes were portrayed in the fashion that they were, the disconnected plot and movable characters defeat the purpose of telling a story about perhaps the most formidable monarch in English history.Cate Blanchett is an exceptional young actress, who can be appreciated for her portrayal of Elizabeth, a woman who was confronted with suitors and questions regarding her faith.
The Duke of Norfolk's service to Mary Tudor and intrigues to overthrow Elizabeth are well portrayed by the commanding presence of Christopher Eccleston, who in the end signs away his life trying to take Elizabeth's.After reading all of the praises I have for the acting in the movie, we must return to the reality that the film could have been better if told by a different director and with a different script.
Even more grievous, in my view, is the makers' apparent assumption that their audience would know no better.The film's conclusion that ER I devoted herself to the rule of England only after she had been betrayed by her lover, Essex, was both a disgusting stereotype of women (that they abandon sex and men after men behave as they will) and gross distortion through oversimplification of the immensely complex political, social, and religious on domestic and international levels that Elizabeth found herself thrust into.In truth, ER was an adept student and observer of her father, Henry VIII, and, in that respect, a more than worthy successor to the transformation of the political map of Europe from the quasi-theocracy of the Middle Ages to secular government by sovereigns that understood that they had obligations to the land and people over whom they ruled.
"Elizabeth" missed this point entirely and in so doing, dishonored one of the truly great people of world history and insulted and disserved movie audiences at the moment of embarking on a new millennium, when we need all of the insights and perspective that we can get..
A biopic of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth's rise to power in England showing the corruption in her court with assassinations, unsuitable suitors, political marriages and treachery.This is very much a historical costume drama for those that dislike the dry, lifeless drama of other period dramas such as Merchant & Ivory etc.
It is good to watch a period drama that is so very vibrant and colourful.Cate Blanchett is great as Elisabeth but the supporting cast are roundly fantastic - Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston the list of quality actors goes on goes on.
This excellent historic drama recreates the wars , loves , turmoil and struggle for power by Robert Dudley , Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes) whom the Queen Elizabeth I both loved and feared , and whose downfall she ultimately invoked .
This elaborate , colorful costumer drama packs outstanding performances from Cate Blanchet as an impulsive queen , Joseph Fiennes as a dashing and arrogant Earl , besides a top-notch support cast giving strong acting , such as the charismatic Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham , Richard Attenborough as Sir William Cecil , Christopher Eccleston as Duke of Norfolk , Jamie Foreman as Earl of Sussex , Fanny Ardant as Mary of Guise , Vincent Cassel as Duc d'Anjou , Kelly MacDonald , James Frain , Emily Mortimer , Amanda Ryan , among them .
The motion picture was rightly written by by Michael Hirst (The Tudor) and finely directed by Shakar Kapur , an Indian director , costumer expert (Elizabeth I and II , Bandit Queen , Four feathers).Other renditions about this known Queen are the following : ¨Elizabeth : The golden age¨ with Cate Blanchett , Jordi Molla , Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush directed by Shekar Kapur ; ¨Elizabeth R¨ directed by Herbert Wise (72, TV) with Bette Davis ; ¨Elizabeth the Queen¨ (68, TV) with Judith Anderson and Charlton Heston ; and classic version , ¨The Queen Virgin¨ by George Sidney with Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger and ¨The private lives of Elizabeth and Essex¨ by Michael Curtiz with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn , among others.
The performances were flawless; Cate Blanchett was above mesmerising as Elizabeth, and she is supported by an outstanding cast that include Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes, Christopher Ecceleston and Richard Attenborough.
Queen Elizabeth was perhaps the most powerful woman in history, so I find it hard to accept this film's portrayal of her as hesitant, dithering, and totally indebted to her advisers for her success.
It's painful to watch this movie, because the overpowering beauty of the locations, the cinematography, and the cast (mainly Cate Blanchett) is used in the service of an almost unbelievably shallow, smug, and cynical reading of English history.
It's a strange coincidence that today I was finally struck with the proper motivation to sit down and watch Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth, because this is the rare biopic that does exactly that.The film focuses on Queen Elizabeth I of England, but instead of trying to detail her entire life, Michael Hirst's script centers on when Elizabeth first takes the throne and the tribulations that she encountered upon coming into power; tribulations seems far too meager a word though, for what she had to face.
Elizabeth I has always been one of my all-time favorite historical characters.While this film is visually stunning the historical accuracy rates a Less Than Zero.Cate Blanchett was amazing as Elizabeth -- truly an amazing performance; and the FACES -- the casting director had a field day -- (almost) everyone looked just the way I thought they should look.The sole exception was Sir Richard Attenborough...
the acting - the performance of Sir John Gielgud in a small role is a good example -, the costumes, the cinematography - few memorable scenes -, the realistic transformation of a young girl in the great queen.
Joseph Fiennes is only adequate as Elizabeth's controversial love interest while Vincent Cassel plays his role as a cross-dressing suitor with such an inappropriately comic edge that he feels like part of an entirely different film.
This is a complex topic to try and do in a film and it shows.We are taken through all the main points of Elizabeth's rise to power but there simply isn't enough time to explain the character's actions, particularly those that oppose her, and this leaves certain scenes seeming pointless even though they probably had huge significance, the biggest instance of this is when she wins a vote and we aren't really told why we should care.The performances are good, Blanchett is superb, but few characters are given a chance to perform.
Eccleston is particularly wasted as her main opponent, the Duke of Norfolk, he delivers some menace while on screen but has so few lines it is hard to know, or care, what his motivation really is.I suppose the slight writing for the other characters can be forgiven to some extent since the film is about Elizabeth and focuses on her love life and it's impact on politics and vice versa but as Queen her actions were driven by the powerful people around her and by not giving them a voice the film seems pointless and shallow.It is supposed to be an historical film and the lack of detail leaves you confused as to the significance of events and people and that in turns leaves you feeling a little cheated, it's as if there is a great film there somewhere but you aren't being shown it.
Christopher Eccleston is spot-on as the villainous Norfolk just doing what he believes is best for his nation; Joseph Fiennes is good as Lord Robert, however at times seems a bit too theatric; Richard Attenborough brings a nice turn as the Queen's closest adviser, wrestling with his belief in her at the expense of his thoughts that she is just a woman; and then we have the numerous cameos from the likes of Emily Mortimer, Kelly MacDonald, Daniel Craig, James Frain (also starring in the Tudors), and a gem of comedy to lighten the mood from Vincent Cassel.
I have seen this film again over the weekend on a German broadcast network.I must admit, I still loved it, even though that I definitely know more about history nowadays than I knew when it came up.It doesn't matter if it is 100 % historically accurate or not, but it follows the events rather closely, and there is no liberty in the script to make things look more dramatic than they actually were.
Although I enjoyed the acting (Cate Blanchett was brilliant as Elizabeth) and the art direction very much, there were severe historical inaccuracies throughout the movie, even at the near beginning.....When Elizabeth was not making love with Robert Dudley when she was arrested for suspicion in the Thomas Wyatt rebellion of 1554.
Cate Blanchett is a stunning Elizabeth, although I feel the insistence of the film to focus on the early part of her reign is a little disappointing.
The costumes and scenography are well done, most of the cast is good and Geoffrey Rush (from "Shine") is great as the queen's ruthless adviser.But Cate Blanchett simply is not up to it.
The performance in this movie is really the big reason to watch it because she does a great job portraying a younger Queen Elizabeth.
And the film does portrait the political game of the fifteenth century very well, with some dramatization and simplification here and there in order for the common viewer to keep track of the event ,but with out losing the essence of the story.As for the queen herself, Cate Blanchett gave a great performance of the character and she showed very well how difficult and at times heartbreaking was for her to adapt to a court divided in which who you like and who you trust doesn't always mean the same person.
This is an good historical film, which depicts the initial period of Elizabeth I of England's reign, and how she tried to hold on to power before her enemies.
A reunion, of sorts, for Shakespeare in Love actors Geoffrey Rush and Joseph Fiennes, Shekhar Kapur's 1998 epic combines their talents along with Cate Blanchett's in the film Elizabeth.
Telling the story of the turbulent events leading to Queen Elizabeth's rise to power and outlining the origin of the Catholic against Protestant war in Europe, Kapur's film brings to life the beginning of the Golden Age of England.
Yet this is nonsense – in Elizabeth's case the history is fascinating and with great actors such as Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Ecclestone and Sir Richard Attenborough, a true and accurate film about Elizabeth's reign would have been quite enough.Having said this, if you can ignore the multitude of historical inaccuracies and take the film on its own merits, the movie is well produced with great acting performances.
Geoffrey Rush's portrayal as Francis Walsingham, however, is the stand out performance for me.The film is actually a doomed love story surrounding the friendship between Dudley and the Queen.
An interesting fact – Dudley played host to the Queen at Kenilworth Castle where, as part of the pomp, fireworks were used for the very first time in England.So to sum up, Elizabeth is a great film but chunks of it are not true.