Elizabeth - The Golden Age DVD > Reviews > A golden turkey for the Christmas season

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Liked it
Story	Satisfactory
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Unmemorable
How does it compare to similar films?	Not applicable

Advantages:	Fantastic clothes, great architecture
Disadvantages:	A bit too creative in its intepretation of history

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

FILM ONLY - this one shouldn' t be out on DVD for quite a while.

Spoiler warning - get real! If you know any history at all, then you know the plot of this film. Any historical film assumes that the viewers know at least a bit about the story. Although it should be said that there's not a lot of evidence that the scriptwriters did. Please don't go too hard on me for any 'plot' revelations - I think they are necessary and you can be expected to know the key bits.

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Elizabeth the Golden Age is a wonderful feast of frocks and soaring ceilings - fab architecture, atmospheric floaty fabrics, great wigs, gorgeous gowns and very little evidence that the writer/director/whoever actually gave a damn about any kind of historical accuracy.

Cate Blanchett is back again reprising a role that established her credibility as a proper actress and putting in a performance that suggests she's sometimes not sure if she's playing the Virgin Queen or doing the 'fourth in the trilogy' of Lord of the Rings films. I've not seen the original Elizabeth film but I have to conclude that it must have been better than its successor. If the first had been similar it's hard to imagine that it could have got funding for a follow up.

Elizabeth the first - or Elizabeth as she'd have been then, obviously not realising that we'd have our own good Queen Bess 400 years later - is now in her mid-50s and the Catholics are revolting. The Catholics for the purposes of this film spend most of their time in a cellar dyeing leather red - why? I have no idea. I thought maybe it would become apparent - perhaps a sudden rush of red-leather-jacketed Papists would descend on the palace? But no - I still don't know what the tanning was all about and if I was a Catholic (I'll rephrase that - a proper Catholic) I'd probably be pretty offended by their unsympathetic portrayal.

Phillip of Spain is the George W Bush of his time - he's got all the land, has chopped down all the trees to build battleships and is looking for a damn good Holy War and an opportunity to put his demon-child, daughter Isabella, on the English throne. Isabella has an eerie red-haired doll and no lines to speak - she's very spooky. Philip is looking for a good excuse for a dust-up and in the absence of any 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' and UN approval, his best bet lies with the incarcerated Mary Queen of Scots. Now if something nasty should happen to MQS, Phillip would have a Grade A excuse for sending all those lovely ships on a jaunt to England and a reason to encourage all the English Catholics to help him oust Liz and put a good Catholic back on the throne.

Meanwhile back at the palace - Liz is having her hair done, going for jaunts on the river, taking a bath (something history suggests she didn't do very often), making slightly Sapphic approaches to her ward Bess, marching around a bit, getting marriage approaches from the royal families of Europe and hosting the odd party.

Her chief advisor, Walsingham, is played by Geoffrey Rush who just looks bored and a touch embarrassed. He sneaks around in dark places and reads lots of letters and does the odd bit of unconvincing spying. With Liz still referred to as the Virgin Queen, he kicks off an odd discussion about how there's still time to have an heir. Hmm -did they have IVF in the 16th Century? One of my favourite scenes is where the suitor from Austria (or somewhere like that) turns up to pay court in the most stilted and flowery English. He's less than half her age and looks utterly terrified.

Anyway, back to the plot - such as it is. On one of her wanderings a strange chap throws his coat in her path to protect her delicate little toes from a puddle. Enter the one-dimensional and wooden Clive Owen as Walter Raleigh - charmer, adventurer and according to the Spanish ambassador, a shameless pirate. And that brings me so nicely onto the Spanish. Monty Python could not have created a more bizarre set of comic-book Spaniards - it looked like the film had sent out for a 'half-dozen generic greasy-looking dark blokes with beards. And make sure they don't mind wearing tights'.

Walter turns up in court to present his goodies from the 'New World' where he's just named a bit of land 'Virginia' after his Queen. There's a big trunk full of potatoes and tobacco - much sniggering when Walsingham is ordered to try the uncooked tato - and a chest of Spanish gold. 'Piracy' shouts the Spanish Ambassador and stomps out with his identikit entourage.

Liz takes a shine to Walt but being a sworn virgin who's promised herself mind, body and soul to her people, and 19 years older than him, she can't court the object of her attention. Instead she instructs her ward Bess to get to know him so they have an excuse to keep him around. As you might imagine, one thing leads to another but not to historical accuracy. History shows that Bess was killed and Walter locked up in the tower for their indiscretions but never mind - that would have not suited the script writers.

Meanwhile at Fotheringhay Castle MQS is locked up in a fairly luxurious way. Fortheringhay is near Peterborough - one of the flattest, bleakest places on earth. But creating a castle surrounded by big bleak mountains is much more fun for the CGI guys so that's what we get. Oh, and a nice big lake for the castle to sit on - it's more of a cross between Camelot, that lovely castle in Scotland that sounds like Eileen Doon but is spelled completely differently and something from Lord of the Rings. It's not a castle on a small mound surrounded by windswept Cambridgeshire flatness. If you go to Fotheringhay today, the Castle is long gone but you can't fail to notice the whopping big church that dominates the village and was apparently built so that MQS could be reminded of the might of the Protestant church. Needless to say, there's no church in film-Fotheringhay.

I'm reliably informed by my historian friend Linda that MQS not only didn't speak with a Scottish accent but didn't ACTUALLY speak English at all. She only spoke French so we could have had some subtitles but we shouldn't have had the accent. MQS sends messages to the underground rebel Catholics and suddenly the signal is given for them to assassinate the Queen. Off they go - looking so furtive that even a blind man could see they were up to no good. Suddenly they cause a diversion and burst in on Liz at her prayers. The gun - which apparently was of a type not invented for a few decades longer (according again to my friend) - is fired and the queen lives on. OK, I could tell you why but I still don't entirely understand that bit of the plot but it looks like the idea was not to actually kill her but to give her a reason to kill her half-sister and give Phil a good reason for a war.

And so back to Fotheringhay where MQS is killed - cleanly and quickly with an axe whilst historical records suggest the executioner botched the beheading so badly that he had to hack away at her for ages to get the job done. Now Phil has the perfect excuse and he declares war and sends his Armada to teach Liz a lesson. In the film it looks like this all happened very quickly but MQS actually died in February 1587 and the Armada was over a year later.

On to the battle. Now then I'm willing to bet that if you had to come up with a quote attributed to Elizabeth it would be that speech from the eve of the Armada - the one that goes something like 'though I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart of a king, and a king of England too'. But no, it's not in this film - maybe they used it in the first film, I don't know. Whilst history shows that Elizabeth did address the troops on the eve of the battle, I'm sceptical that she strapped on her made-to-measure designer armour and a long flowing red wig and climbed astride her white horse. It's a 'Joan of Arc meets Henry the Fifth' moment. Even the horse is looking embarrassed. And how come she's switched from side-saddle to riding astride 'just like that'?

Meanwhile in the Bridgend Odeon Linda asks 'where's Francis Drake'? Surely they can't leave him out of the Spanish Armada plot completely. And no, they don't quite manage that but they do give the main role to Walter Raleigh who we see clinging to the outside of a burning boat looking more like an extra from Pirates of the Caribbean, and leaping into the burning sea. Apparently the battles with the Spanish Armada took nine days and the English ships did well because they were smaller and more manoeuvrable. In the film it looks like the battle took about a day and the key Armada messages seem to be that the Spanish were sissies who didn't like rough weather and Walter Raleigh/Clive Owen could have been a 16th Century James Bond. Was Raleigh even involved in the Armada? How pissed off would Drake be if he was in the back row of the cinema today?

So what did I think of it? Aside from the hours we spent dissecting the historical inaccuracies and the ludicrous impression that both Liz and Phil lived in cathedrals, it was actually quite fun. If you treat this as a work of fiction then you can sit back and enjoy the fantastic costumes and the beautiful architecture. Blanchett is fast becoming the people's choice for any portrayal of Elizabeth although I must admit I though the girl from Shameless (Anne-marie Duff??) did a great job in a TV series a few years back.

I loved the locations whilst simultaneously totally disbelieving that any of them were appropriate. Where did Elizabeth actually live? I have no idea but I'm willing to believe it wasn't in a grey stone cathedral. Bearing in mind that her dad Henry the Eighth built Hampton Court Palace, a lovely building and actually a fairly practical place to live, I couldn't help but wonder how ANYONE could have heated the 3 or 4 storey nave-like rooms in the film. The sets were stunning with some amazing furniture, lots of floaty gauze all over the place but practical? Not at all. Realistic? - hardly. Hubby thinks that the chapel from the Tower of London might have been one of the locations and I read somewhere else that Westminster Cathedral (the ironically Catholic cathedral that's much overlooked in favour of Westminster Abbey) may have also been involved.

The frocks were outstanding if a bit fairy-tale at times. If this film gets any award nominations they should surely be for costumes or make up. But as far as I know there's no major film award that's based on historical accuracy. Which is probably a good thing because this one would be popular as left over turkey three days after Christmas.