Six of the best - 1998 -
part 2
Truman Show
Saving Private Ryan
Elizabeth
Shakespeare in Love
Mask of Zorro and
Out of Sight
A few years ago Cath and I contemplated the writing of a revised history of the world, tentatively entitled "Everything I know about history I learned at the movies". In it we would have traced the history of the world from one million years BC, when the first men grunted at dinosaurs which had survived their own extinction, through the glory that was Hollywood Egypt, Greece and Rome and the very special middle ages of droit de seigneur and the Round Table to the modern world of Errol Flynn singled-handedly defeating the Germans before embarking east, announcing to the world, "And now for Australia and a crack at the Japs." Like many of our great ideas, we found that it had been done already.
But the moral of the book would have been that only the developmentally disabled go the historical fiction movies and quibble at the "errors" in history. (My all time favourite just about was the woman who, after viewing Excalibur, could only remark that, of course, medieval knights rode destriers and, in the film, the horse's legs were too thin.)
CM
is the Featured Attractions Review and Criticism section.
Also in
CM
Alphabetical archive of movies reviewed
also in
Movies
Opening Credits
Critical Mess - Reviews
From the Director's Chair - Essays
Lists
Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth inspired more of this sort of reaction than any movie I can recall for some time, perhaps since Gandhi. So let me state the bleeding obvious to begin with: I don't regard Elizabeth as an historically accurate account of the rise to sole rule of the eponymous monarch. But, by god, if this was not how it happened, it is how it should have happened. The writer, Michael Hirst (credit where credit is due), has created a narrative which presents us with a believable development of Gloriana.
What really makes this movie work so well is the casting of the major parts. Ralph's younger brother Joseph Fiennes is effective as the ardent love of Elizabeth's life but even he plays second fiddle to three great performances.
Geoffrey Rush's Walsingham is spot on, capturing the enigmatic good/evil of the Elizabethan courtier/spy. Unfortunately, he doesn't have enough to do in the development of the narrative.
Cate Blanchett is incredibly believable as the callow ingenue, Elizabeth, with her obvious strengths balanced by a youthful impulsiveness. But we see her learn, see her change and see her mature into the queen regnant. The scene of her rehearsal for her first parliamentary speech is one particularly good example of the effective use of editing with great performance. The makings of the scene are in Blanchett's acting but it is made better by the cutting.
To me, however, the performance of the movie, and the discovery in it, was Christopher Eccleston. His brooding Duke of Norfolk provides the centre of the opposition to the girl-queen. Without the strength of his villainy, there would have been little necessity for Elizabeth's change and hardening. Eccleston's darkly sinister features complement his cadaverous body to create a polar repellent for Elizabeth.
Finally I must note, as I rarely do, the backgrounds - the bells and the whistles, if you will. Kapur's use of high camera angles in the authentic settings helps create the darking shadows in which conspiracies and plots seem natural, formenting the drama that unfolds. The lavish costuming, particularly of Elizabeth herself, adds a visual spice to the other sensual delights of the film.
This was a richly satisfying filmic experience. Probably the best of the movies I've seen from the 1998 crop, although another Elizabethan drama gives it a run for its money.
Start quoting him now
The last time Shakespeare was made cinematically palatable to the plebian taste was when Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore sashayed across the screen in Kiss Me Kate. Since then there have been a plethora of earnest adaptations of the Bard, with the occasional acknowledgement that, in their origin, the plays appealed not just to the higher sensibilities but the baser tastes of the groundlings as well. Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing got closest of the recent spate.
Imagine now a film in which Shakespeare has writer's block and it is only the intervention of a real-life cross-dressing rich girl that gives him the inspiration for his poetry and plays, particularly Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. That's the 'McGuffin' in a rollicking travesty of history and literature, the final version of which was penned by Tom Stoppard, who has made a living writing such brilliant travesties.
Now the plot is similar to a couple of earlier works. Some attention has been drawn to Brahms and Simon's 1940s (now almost unreadable) humorous novel, No Bed for Bacon, which has similar plot elements. And a decade ago, Faye Kellerman wrote an historical detective novel, The Quality of Mercy, which featured Shakespeare as the main character and the intervention of a cross-dressing daughter of a gentrified house. But, in the light of the Bard's somewhat cavalier approach to the adoption of other people's stories to form the basic plots of his plays, including Romeo and Juliet, there is a certain irony to any criticism on such grounds.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow
The reason this film works is that it appeals to that same broad taste as Shakespeare's plays. There are slapstick and comic elements galore but they are subtly blended with a nice romance, a sharp satire of modern theatre and films and some choice comic references to Shakespeare and Elizabethan society.
The cast is uniformly excellent from Joseph Fiennes (again cast in the romantic lead in an Elizabethan movie but this time he is given a meatier part) and Gwynneth Paltrow whose Viola is both lively and believable in the lead roles, through great support cast of British hams (with the token Yank and Aussie ham thrown in), to the bit players playing the bit players of the Elizabethan theatre. It would be invidious to single them out as their work is inspired by a magnificent script
Edward Zwick (Glory, Courage Under Fire etc) was set to direct (he had been responsible for the development of the script) but was caught filming The Siege and had to pass the project along to John Madden, fresh from Her Majesty Mrs Brown. Madden's approach works in this case where Zwick's more earnest style might have worked against the boisterousness of the script.
It keeps coming back to the script. I am unsure as to the relative contributions of Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. The blatherings seem to indicate that the shooting script was almost completely Stoppard who wrote the words to complement Norman's story. I've got a feeling that it is not quite as simple as that but, certainly, it would be a fair bet that Stoppard provided the bulk of the Shakespearian in-jokes, the Elizabethan references and the sly word-plays.
The reasons for it working are, as Philip Henslowe notes in the film, "a mystery" but, in the way of the original Shakespearian inspirations, with a couple of comic turns, a few coincidences and a regina ex machina or two, things come together beautifully and this is an incredibly satisfying movie experience.
Six of the best
part
one
Six of the best
part three
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]