Gods of Egypt: It was Watch This or Grade Exams

Tags

Alex Proyas, Ancient Egypt, Geoffrey Rush, Gerard Butler, Mythology, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Religious Stuff

So I forced my unfortunate husband to go to Gods of Egypt (2016, dir. Alex Proyas), because it was a way to get out of grading freshman exams for a while. After all the hoopla about it being an egregious example of whitewashing ancient history, I figured I had a duty to my readers to weigh in on it.

Let’s get that issue out of the way right at the start. It’s an appallingly bad example of whitewashing. Even allowing for some uncertainty about the ethnic composition of ancient Egypt, the film is awfully white. Of the main actors, one (Chadwick Boseman) is black, one (Elodie Yung) is half-Asian, and one (Gerard Butler) is wearing swarthy-face make-up. Everyone else is whiter than my untanned ass. There are lots of blacks and Middle Easterners in non-speaking roles, but literally just two with speaking parts (and one of them mostly just hisses, if memory serves). It’s so bad, it’s downright embarrassing, especially for Butler, who looks like he spent the morning exploring an alternative career as a chimney-sweep before deciding that being in this film was the better option pay-wise.

 

Gerard Butler looking swarthy

But, if you can see past that problem with the film (and I realize that’s a big but), what you see is a film with a whole host of other problems that make the racial issues feel like an afterthought. The acting is lousy, the plot is fairly predictable, the script is shudderingly bad, and the special effects are bloated and excessive. But, hey, they thought to cast a black man in a supporting role! So that’s something.

Normally, at this point, I’d give you a Spoiler Alert. But that implies that this movie could actually be spoiled by finding out what happens in it. You already know what happens in it, which is that it sucks a lot.

Basically, Osiris and Isis have ruled the Nile for a thousand years. They’re gods, which means they’re 9 feet tall while the human Egyptians are normal-sized. Osiris has decided it’s time to step down and let his son, Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), be king, so long as he agrees to let people call him Horus. And, because Osiris is a nice guy, he’s going to let all the Egyptians into the Afterlife for free. But his evil brother Set (Gerard Butler) interrupts the coronation ceremony to show off his new skin-bronzer and in the process manages to kill Osiris, beat the crap out of Jaime and rip out his eyes, and steal the crown of Egypt. And, because he’s a dick, he’s going to force people to buy their way into the Afterlife with treasure. Ain’t capitalism grand?

Nicholaj Coster-Waldau taking a break from Game of Thrones by playing Jaime Lannister in Egypt

Fortunately for everyone except the audience, there’s a plucky mortal hero, Bek (Brandon Thwaites), who’s a cheekily-disrespectful roguish thief, who only becomes intolerably annoying when the film hits the two-minute mark. He sets off to rescue his love, Zaya (Courtney Eaton), who’s been killed by Set’s evil architect. He steals one of Jaime’s eyes from Set’s treasure vault, tracks down Jaime and offers him a bargain: Bek will help Jaime recover his other eye (without which he can’t be really super-powerful) and Jaime will bring Zaya back from the dead (which turns out to be just a lie, but that’s the way the Lannisters do things, right?). So Jaime and Bek set out on a series of adventures to recover the missing eye.

That guy in the background is thinking “Dude, how did these two white people get cast as Egyptians?”

Along the way, they pay a visit to Jaime’s grandfather Ra (Geoffrey Rush) in his ship that drags the sun across the sky, where Ra fights the serpent Apophis every night. (Actually, this scene accidentally manages to be ok.) Then there are various fights with orcs and a couple of understudies for Lady Sylvia Marsh from Lair of the White Worm and some really boring scenes between Set and some goddesses in which nothing gets killed but we find out what the next movie in the franchise is going to be about.

Finally they get to meet up with Chadwick Boseman, who has cleverly hidden the first H in his name so that everyone else has to call him ‘Toth’ but he knows that his name is actually Thoth and so he gets to quietly feel smug about everyone else mispronouncing his name. And T(h)oth gets the Riddle of the Sphinx wrong the first two times but totally aces it on the third try but then…oh, fuck it. You don’t give a damn about a full plot synopsis and I can’t be bothered to figure out what the hell is actually going on in this movie that makes about as much sense as some of the freshman exams I’m currently grading.

Let’s just say that all of this turns out to be an excuse for Set to flog his daddy issues with Ra, who never loved him enough as a kid and couldn’t be bothered to watch his son’s baseball games because he was busy fighting the serpent that wants to devour the world. Set wants to be immortal, but to do that he needs to destroy the Afterlife so he can live forever in Egypt. So Set tries to kill Ra and steals his magic spear that’s necessary to kill the cosmic snake because he’s got Freud issues going on. Without Ra to stop him, Apophis goes crazy and starts eating the Nile because somehow that will destroy the Afterlife. And Jaime winds up having to fight Mecha-Set but opts to save Bek rather than recover his lost eye and then he wishes Zaya back to life because really this whole damn film is just a Very Special Episode of Blossom about the importance of gods and mortals respecting each other.

Mecha-Set

Fortunately the sequel gets killed off about halfway through the film.

 

So, Does This Film Have Anything to Do with Ancient Egypt?

I’m glad you asked that. No.

I mean, yes, it’s called Gods of Egypt and it’s set along the Nile, and it’s got some buildings that look sort of ancient Egyptian if you squint the right way, and the main characters mostly have the same name as various Egyptian gods. But as Proyas himself has said, “…the world of Gods of Egypt never really existed. It is inspired by Egyptian mythology, but it makes no attempt at historical accuracy because that would be pointless — none of the events in the movie ever really happened. It is about as reality-based as Star Wars — which is not real at all …Maybe one day if I get to make further chapters I will reveal the context of the when and where of the story. But one thing is for sure — it is not set in Ancient Egypt at all.”

So, really, the film could just as easily be called Gods of South Dakota, which from the ethnicity of the cast would probably be just about right.

The film basically picks bits at random from Egyptian mythology, without actually bothering to understand how any of it fits together or what it might mean, sort of like a freshman history student writing a mid-term.

The Afterlife features as a key plot point in the movie, but the film has only a minimal understanding of Egyptian notions of what happens after death. The Egyptian Underworld was called Duat, and it was pictured as being much like Egypt, only better. The problem was that getting to Duat was difficult, and a lot of things could go wrong. The deceased person’s body has to survive; without it, the dead person’s soul would be annihilated. The person’s name had to be preserved as well. There were complex rituals to embalm the corpse (hello, mummies!) and “open its mouth” so that the dead soul could speak the proper ritual formulas as it journeys through Duat, so it can get past various monsters and obstacles. The dead person’s heart was weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the Goddess of Truth, to ensure that the deceased had lived a proper life; if the feather was heavier than the heart, the heart and its soul were devoured. The deceased had to be able to make the 42 Negative Confessions, truthfully denying a long list of moral failures and crimes. Burial practices involved an array of spells, charms, and texts, designed to make sure the dead person knew what to say and when to say it, and that various difficulties could be overcome. And the body of a wealthy person was provided with expensive grave goods to ensure that he or she would live comfortably in Duat.

Weighing the feather of Ma’at against the person’s heart

Gods of Egypt, however, jettisons all that in exchange for a far dumber idea. There’s no burial or mummification required. In the Hall of the Two Truths, the dead just walk up to a scale containing the feather of Ma’at, dump their wealth into the other side of the scale as a bribe to the judges, and hope the bribe is big enough. Otherwise, they’re apparently sent to Hell, through a door that alternately flips between good stuff and bad stuff.

How dumb do you have to be to make a movie about the Egyptian afterlife that doesn’t even involve mummies? That’s like making a movie about a college professor grading exams that doesn’t involve tears, shouts of frustration, and abject misery.

Wait–they cast me to play an Egyptian? WTF?

And Osiris is the God of Duat, but in this film he just disappears after Set offs him. And Isis commits suicide. Wise choice. She doesn’t have to be in the rest of the film.

The biggest problem in the film is Set. He’s correctly associated with the Egyptian desert, which is probably why they gave Butler swarthy-face, to suggest all the time he spent out in the desert. If they’d wanted to be more appropriate, they should have made him red-faced, since the desert is red in Egyptian thought, while the soil of the Nile Valley is black.

Set’s function in Egyptian mythology is hard to explain. He’s a disorderly god, possibly contrasting the sterile, inhospitable nature of the desert to the fertile, orderly Nile Valley of Horus. He’s Ra’s protector when Ra journeys into Duat every night to fight Apophis. He’s the brother of Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys, but he’s also Osiris’ rival. He eventually murders Osiris and struggles with Horus. But ultimately he’s defeated and reconciled to Horus, as a symbol that the Pharaoh (the living embodiment of Horus) is master over everything that challenges Egypt. He’s most definitely not a god of evil, since he’s worshipped regularly in Egypt, alongside all the other gods. It’s only very late in Egyptian culture, when the country is conquered by outsiders, that he is reduced to simple villainy.

Set fighting Apophis

But Gods of Egypt just throws all that out and makes Set a sort of cosmic Donald Trump, gleefully breaking all the rules, terrorizing the Egyptians, respecting nothing but his own power, and building monuments to his own bloated ego and villainy because he’s got daddy issues.

In Egyptian mythology, Set and Horus have sex, because Set is trying to prove his dominance. But Horus catches Set’s semen in his hand and throws it in the Nile. Then he jacks off onto a piece of lettuce and tricks Set into eating it. Then they go to the gods of Egypt to settle the dispute. Set calls to his semen as proof that he dominated Horus, but the semen answers from the river, disproving his claim. Horus then calls to his semen, which answers from inside Set, thus proving that Horus had dominated Set. For some unfathomable reason, the film completely ignores this very important element of Set’s story.

That story would have made for an awesome movie. It would have made for a way better movie than Gods of Egypt, which just sucks. It’s almost worse than grading exams.

 

Want to Know More?

Stop that. This film sucks.

But if you want to know more about the actual gods of Egypt, take a look at a book like The Complete Gods and Goddess of Ancient Egypt by Richard Wilkinson. Or try Emily Teeter’s Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt.

 

Quills: Doing the Nasty

Tags

18th Century Europe, 18th Century France, Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard, Charenton Asylum, Early Modern Europe, Geoffrey Rush, Joaquin Phoenix, Justine, Kate Winslet, Marquis de Sade, Medical Stuff, Michael Caine, Quills, Stephen Moyer, The Enlightenment, The French Revolution

When Quills (2000, dir. Philip Kaufman, based on the play of the same name by Doug Wright) came out, it was received quite well by critics, who praised Geoffrey Rush’s performance as the Marquis de Sade, and it earned Rush his second Academy Award nomination. But it wasn’t so popular with historians, who pointed out its many historical inaccuracies. In particular, Neil Schaeffer, author of The Marquis de Sade: A Life, published a scathing critique of the film as being both inaccurate and simplistic in its depiction of the notorious pornographer. So the movie, like De Sade himself, was quite controversial. Sounds like fun!

 

De Sade’s Life

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a minor French noble born in the mid-18^th century and the poster boy for everything wrong with the 18^th century aristocracy. By the time he was 23, he had begun sexually assaulting prostitutes and employees of both sexes egregiously enough that the police began paying serious attention to him, no small accomplishment at a time when the aristocracy enjoyed substantial legal prerogatives. When he was 28, he hired a woman to be his housekeeper, but then tied her up, and repeatedly tortured her with knives and hot wax. Four years later, in 1772, he and his man-servant were convicted of sodomy and poisoning and fled to Italy to avoid a death sentence.

During all this, his mother-in-law had obtained a lettre de cachet, essentially an extra-judicial order of imprisonment. In 1777, he was lured back to Paris and arrested under the lettre and imprisoned, although he managed to get the death sentence overturned.

The Marquis de Sade

By 1789, when the French Revolution was brewing, he was being incarcerated in the notorious Bastille prison, and nearly triggered the Storming of the Bastille two weeks early when he shouted out a window that the prisoners were being murdered. Just days before the Storming liberated the inmates of the Bastille, de Sade was transferred to the Charenton asylum. But a year later, he was released when the National Assembly invalidated all lettres de cachet. At this point his long-suffering wife divorced him.

He managed to get himself elected to the National Convention and spent several years as a politician before getting on Maximilien Robespierre’s bad side and being arrested. But before he could be executed, Robespierre fell from power and he was released.

He had already begun producing the pornographic works he is famous for during his first imprisonment. In 1801, Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author of the anonymous paired pornographic novels, Justine and Juliette, and eventually the works were traced to de Sade and he was arrested and imprisoned once again. In 1803, his family arranged for him to be declared insane, and he was sent back to the Charenton Asylum, where he remained until his death from natural causes in 1814.

 

The director of Charenton was the Abbé de Coulmier, a Catholic priest known for his liberal attitudes toward the inmates in his charge. Coulmier rejected many of the harsh treatments that were popular at the time, such as the physical restraint of patients and the practice of dunking patients head-first in water. Instead, Coulmier favored therapies such as self-expression, diets, and purges. In particular, he believed that allowing patients to express themselves in writing, theater, and music was helpful.

Because of this, Coulmier allowed de Sade to stage popular French plays, using the inmates as actors, for the viewing pleasure of the Parisian public. But in 1809, police orders required de Sade to be put in solitary confinement and forbidden to write. This confinement turns out to have been not so solitary after all, because in 1810, he began a relationship with Madeleine LeClerc, the 14-year-old daughter of an employee at Charenton. He died in his sleep 4 years later.

The chapel at Charenten

 

De Sade’s Writings

Although de Sade is today mostly remembered as a pornographer and as the man who gave his name to ‘sadism’, he was more complex than that. Not all of his work was obscene; he wrote both political treatises and conventional plays, and he deserves to be ranked as a figure of the Enlightenment. And even his pornographic work is highly intellectual. His paired novels Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and Juliette, or The Rewards of Vice tell the stories of two sisters raised in a convent. But whereas Justine strives to remain virtuous, Juliette comes to believe that morality, virtue, and religion are meaningless. Justine experiences a series of personal disasters, including becoming the unwilling sex-slave of a group of monks. Every good deed she does results in a further sexual assault, humiliation, or other catastrophe, and finally she is struck by lightning and dies, after which her corpse is sexually assaulted. But Juliette willingly engages in the most perverse behaviors possible, indulging in orgies and repeatedly murdering people. Her various accomplices commit rape, murder, incest, and cannibalism. She is ultimately rewarded with an audience with the pope, and the novel ends with another long orgy.

Despite the repulsive content, de Sade has a point to make. Several in fact. Like many 18^th century intellectuals, he rejects conventional religion, and aggressively satirizes it; the clergy in his stories are often the most debauched characters. Given that the clergy enjoyed legal prerogatives as extensive as the nobility’s at this time, including immunity from taxation and most law courts and a strangle-hold on public religious life and education, de Sade’s attacks are remarkably bold and in favor of the separation of Church and State. Some have seen de Sade as challenging God to prove His existence by punishing de Sade’s blasphemies.

 

These two novels demonstrate the idea that virtue and vice are not neatly rewarded and condemned in real life, and the novels represent an effort to build an essentially atheistic moral paradigm celebrating the pursuit of pleasure as the only meaning in life. Nature consistently triumphs over the forces of civilization and restraint. (At least, that’s all assuming you read them seriously, and not as satire, as some scholars do.)

And de Sade’s slow corruption of Juliette, who gradually moves from simple sexual pleasures to full-blown sexual sadism of the most extreme sort, can be read as a challenge to the reader. How far are you willing to take your sexual fantasies? Will you at some point put the book down because you feel it is no longer titillating but rather disgusting, or will you allow the novel to corrupt you as it corrupts Juliette? These books may be deeply disturbing, but they’re also far more thought-provoking than most modern porn.

Nor was de Sade the only author in this period to intermingle pornography with philosophical musings. As the great intellectual historian Robert Darnton has pointed out, philosophical pornography was an extremely popular (if illegal) genre in 18^th century France. Quite a few authors used obscene stories as a way to attack the French clergy and the French political system. De Sade’s novels are the most extreme, but he’s by no means the only author of the day to tell stories of priests fornicating in the confessional and monks debauching nuns during the Eucharist. He’s just the one we still remember.

 

So What Does Quills Make of All This?

The movie opens in 1794 with de Sade apparently writing a story about a woman who is guillotined during the French Revolution and then jumps to ‘years later’ with de Sade in the Charenton asylum. Instead of being sent there for having written Justine, he has written the novel and had it smuggled out of prison by Madeleine (Kate Winslet). Napoleon orders a stop to his publishing, and dispatches Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to Charenton to force Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) to crack down on de Sade’s privileges. Whereas Coulmier is gentle and believes in art therapy, Royer-Collard is old school and favors water-boarding patients. He also has a child bride Simone (Amelia Warner), whom he rather sadistically has sex with on their wedding night.

Geoffrey Rush as de Sade

 

Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard is a real person. In 1806, he was appointed chief physician at Charenton, where he became convinced that de Sade was sane and ought to be in a conventional prison. But his function here is to be the catalyst for everything going wrong at the asylum. Prior to his arrival, de Sade and Coulmier are friends, with de Sade seeking to express his disturbed thoughts on paper.

But Royer-Collard’s attempts to restrain de Sade trigger a contest of wills between the two men, with Coulmier caught in the middle. Royer-Collard’s harsh treatment of his young wife becomes gossip that reaches de Sade’s ears, so de Sade stages a play that is a thinly-veiled sex farce of the marriage. Simone, who sees the first part of the play, becomes interested in de Sade’s writings and secretly tracks down a copy of Justine. Corrupted by it, she runs off with a young architect, played by Stephen Moyer.

Furious at this, Royer-Collard leans on Coulmier, forcing him to gradually restrict de Sade’s privileges. When he takes away de Sade’s writing implements, de Sade figures out how to write with red wine on his bed sheets. When the bed is taken away, he writes in blood on his own clothes. Coulmier states the whole point of the film when he says to de Sade, “The more I forbid, the more you’re provoked.” De Sade points out that Coulmier finds it arousing to have so much power over him.

Joaquin Phoenix as Coulmier

 

Finally, naked and with nothing in his cell, he arranges to dictate a story to Madeleine through a chain of inmates, like an obscene game of Telephone. But one of the aroused inmates intentionally lights a fire, and in the confusion, another inmate rapes and murders Madeleine. Coulmier, who has fallen deeply in lust with the woman thanks to de Sade’s corrosive influence, apparently has sex with her corpse, and then has de Sade’s tongue cut out after water-boarding him. Chained in a cell, de Sade continues writing, using his own feces as ink. He dies in Coulmier’s arms, rejecting the crucifix the priest offers him.

The movie ends with Coulmier now imprisoned in de Sade’s old room, begging a visitor for paper and quill so he can write. He finally understands de Sade’s compulsion to write.

Hopefully from this summary, it should be clear that the film starts off somewhat shaky on the facts, since de Sade didn’t write Justine in prison, because that’s what he was imprisoned for. But it rattles along in the right general historical direction until, in the last hour, the train jumps the track and goes veering off into Crazyland at full speed, bearing its passengers to a world of hurt none of them bought a ticket for.

De Sade is somewhere between a full-blown lunatic with a sexual fixation and a martyr for the cause of free speech. The film can’t quite decide what’s really motivating him. On the one hand, his erotic writing appears to be a symptom of some mental illness; he is literally incapable of not writing, despite the increasing misery it’s causing him. And by the end of the film, he’s infected both Coulmier and arguably Madeleine with his madness.

Coulmier, about to do the literal nasty with Madeleine’s corpse

 

But on the other hand, he’s engaging in a willful defiance of Royer-Collard’s efforts to silence him. The two men fall into a chess match; each action by Royer-Collard to stop de Sade from writing elicits a response from de Sade in which he seeks to demonstrate the doctor’s ultimate impotence to control him. It is Royer-Collard’s efforts to still de Sade’s pen that triggers the next round of outrageous writing, and the marquis’ writings that trigger the next crack-down.

De Sade’s ideas corrupt everyone around him, driving them to lust, in the case of Coulmier, Simone, and the architect, or madness, in the case of the inmates who participate in his telephone game of dictation. Madeleine craves more stories from de Sade and is ultimately killed by the process of dictation, as is de Sade himself. The only character not corrupted by de Sade is Royer-Collard, who is already more of a sadist than de Sade. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea if your martyr for freedom of the press is a man whose writings literally corrupt and destroy those who read them.

Michael Caine as Royer-Collard

 

From a historical standpoint, the problem with Quills is that it too readily accepts the idea of de Sade as a charming madman and barely entertains the possibility that perhaps de Sade was actually trying to actually say something. And it soft-pedals the more literally sadistic elements of his writings. From the snippets of his stories that we hear, de Sade likes to talk about penises and vaginas a lot, and he readily mocks Christianity, but there’s only faint hints that he was also writing about rape, murder, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, and a host of other disturbing things.

So for me at least, Quills doesn’t really work. It fails to grapple effectively with what the historical de Sade was trying to say, and it fails to offer a coherent message about who this man was and why he wrote such outrageous things. In a way, watching the movie feels a bit like reading Justine; instead of sympathizing with any of the characters or being turned on by its decadence, I just wanted to take a shower and put the whole experience behind me.

 

Want to Know More?

Quills is available on Amazon.

If you’d like to learn more about the Marquis de Sade, start with Neil Shaeffer’s The Marquis de Sade: A Life. If you want to sample de Sade’s writings, both Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford World’s Classics)
and Juliette are readily available. But be warned: they are pretty much as hard-core as pornography gets, and they’re not for the easily offended or disgusted.

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: Is EtGA Anti-Catholic?

Tags

16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Babington Plot, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Mary Stuart, Religious Issues, Samantha Morton, Sir Francis Walsingham, The Spanish Armada

When I looked at Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur), I discussed the accusations that the film was anti-Catholic. Similar accusations were made against Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, dir. Shekhar Kapur), so I think it’s worth exploring this issue for the sequel.

The accusations came from a variety of different sources. Stephan Greydanus, reviewing the film for the National Catholic Register, said that “Pound for pound, minute for minute, Elizabeth: the Golden Age could possibly contain more sustained [Catholic] church-bashing than any other film I can think of” and argues that the film selectively focuses on creepy Catholic rituals led by imposing clergymen while representing Protestantism with silent prayer and conveniently forgets that Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity made attendance at Anglican services compulsory. Stephen Whitty of the Star Ledger accuses the film of depicting Catholicism as “some sort of horror-movie cult”. Other critiques of the film make similar points.

So far as I can see, the complaints primarily focus on stylistic issues. Spanish Catholics are portrayed in creepy ways (Jordi Molla’s Philip II has an odd sort of duck-walk, for example). Catholic rituals are shown as dark and mysterious in contrast to Elizabeth’s silent prayers in light-filled chapels, the liturgical Latin is left untranslated, and when the Armada sinks, we get several shots of religious paraphernalia sinking into the waters of the English Channel. Some critics also claims that, much like Elizabeth, all the Catholics in the film are villainous.

And it’s hard to deny that the film does present Spanish Catholicism in rather ominous ways, particularly in the person of Philip II, who possesses unwavering certainty about the righteousness of his cause until he is devastated by the defeat of the Armada. The scenes in Philip’s palace were filmed inside Westminster Cathedral, London’s Catholic cathedral, a not particularly subtle touch for those who recognize the location. The crucifix and rosary sinking into the English Channel is rather heavy-handed.

The sinking rosary

In the case of Elizabeth, I concluded that the film was anti-Catholic because it actively twists the facts to present most of the Catholics in the film as bad guys, and all the bad guys as Catholics. EtGA, however, doesn’t do that. The Spanish are pretty much entirely villainous, although some of Philip’s advisors lack his certainty. But most of the other Catholics in the film are not especially villainous. Early in the film Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish) has a brief meeting with a Catholic cousin of hers, who begs her for help. He is frightened of the English government and willing to convert to Anglicanism, but Bess refuses to help and leaves. Soon thereafter her cousin is arrested and tortured to death by Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) in a scene that highlights the gruesomeness of Elizabethan interrogation strategies.

Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) is shown to be involved in the plot that ultimately gets her executed, but the film makes clear that the plot is substantially caused by Walsingham’s machinations; Mary’s plotting is presented as a justified response to her captivity. Her execution is presented in a way that allows the viewer to sympathize with her; she forgives her executioner, and she is shown going to her death wearing a red dress, the Catholic liturgical color for martyrs. In other words, the film stylistically suggests she is an innocent martyr of religious intolerance and not a villain.

Mary at the chopping block

In both cases, the film suggests that Walsingham’s actions are as much about religious persecution as about protecting his queen. He kills two desperate Catholics, one of whom actively wishes to be a loyal citizen and the other of whom is driven into plotting by his actions.

The film reinforces this with the plot. By executing Mary Stuart, Walsingham is actually playing into Philip II’s hands by giving Spain a justification to invade England. He admits to Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) that the execution was a mistake, and Elizabeth says that she too has erred by executing her cousin. So the film itself makes a point of saying that the execution of Mary Stuart was the wrong thing to do.

Some of the reviews comment that the film reinforces the notion of murderous Catholic priests in the character of Richard Reston, who is actually John Ballard of the Babington Plot renamed. But what this complaint fails to acknowledge is that John Ballard was actually a Jesuit priest seeking to assassinate Elizabeth, which is exactly what Reston does in this film. Reston is shown killing one of Walsingham’s spies, which never happened, but his role as a planner of the assassination attempt is broadly historically accurate. It’s unreasonable to say that his depiction as ‘murderous’ is anti-Catholic when the man was in real life seeking to orchestrate murder.

So in my opinion, claims that the film demonizes all its Catholic characters are false, and fail to recognize that the film presents Walsingham as driven to unjust actions because of an excess of zeal that he himself eventually recognizes to be a mistake.

Kapur’s Response to the Accusations

Shekhar Kapur insists that the film should not be read as anti-Catholic. “It is anti-extreme forms of religion…So it’s not anti-Catholic. It’s anti an interpretation of the word of God that can be singular.” And this is definitely born out by the structure of the plot itself. Walsingham’s zeal (which is an ambiguous mixture of Protestantism and loyalty to his queen) leads him into a strategic mistake that he repents of. The Armada leaves itself vulnerable to attack by Raleigh’s fire-ships because everyone is praying for victory. At the end of the film, Philip attributes his defeat to his own pride and begs forgiveness of God while his daughter and his clergy turn their backs on him.

Additionally, if the film has wanted to make Catholicism explicitly evil, it could easily have included a famous historical detail. After the Armada was defeated by storms that drove it around the British Isles, the English government issued a commemorative medal that said “Jehovah blew and they were scattered” (Flavit Jehovah et dissipati sunt). In doing so, the English government was asserting that the Armada was defeated through divine intervention because Anglicanism was God’s preferred denomination. The film makes no mention of God’s help in defeating the Armada, which instead happens through Raleigh’s cunning and Spanish zealotry.

The Armada Medallion

As fellow scholar Paul Halsall pointed out to me after my post on Elizabeth’s anti-Catholicism, the traditional English view of English history is heavily steeped in Protestantism and hostility to Catholicism. England’s two post-medieval Catholic monarchs, Mary I and James II, are typically viewed in a very negative light. Elizabeth is praised for her efforts to establish some sort of religious compromise (even though that compromise was fairly prejudicial to Catholics), and the victory over the Armada is seen as a great patriotic success at a time of extreme danger. ‘Good Queen Bess’ was one of the greatest of English monarchs, and her Protestantism is a key part of her identity (even if Elizabeth’s personal religious beliefs are a little unclear). So I think if there are anti-Catholic elements in the film, they are more an artifact of traditional English ideas about Elizabeth and the Armada than any conscious animus on Kapur’s part.

So while the film certainly demonizes the Spanish Catholics, I think Kapur is fair in saying that he’s condemning religious extremism rather than Catholicism per se. The plot of the film depicts both Protestants and Catholics as being capable of religious intolerance. It punishes the Spanish for their intolerance, shows how vulnerable Walsingham’s actions have left England, and displays sympathy for both Protestants (Elizabeth) and Catholics (Mary, Throckmorton’s cousin) who are simply practicing their faith. It may avoid addressing some of the ways that Elizabeth persecuted Catholics, but it does acknowledge that Catholics were persecuted. Its representatives of zealotry are both forced to repent of their actions. The film does resort to some tropes of Catholicism as dark and mysterious but I think that is more due to the fact that, having taken Elizabeth as the heroine of the story, the Spanish must inevitably be cast as the bad guys. If Kapur crosses the line in some of the details of how he depicts Spanish Catholicism, I think he more than balances it out with the way the plot is structured. The film lacks the egregious historical distortions that villainize the Catholics in Elizabeth. So I’m inclined to disagree with the accusations of anti-Catholic bias directed against Elizabeth: the Golden Age.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: All Romance, All the Time

Tags

16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Abbie Cornish, Bess Throckmorton, Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Sir Walter Raleigh, Tudor England

Like Elizabeth, Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, Shekhar Kapur) is as much about Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) lack of a love life as it is about the plots swirling around her. In this film, the object of her erotic fixation is Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), the famous soldier, explorer and pirate.

Raleigh was something of an adventurer. He fought for the Huguenots in France, helped suppress a rebellion in Ireland, explored the Atlantic Coast of North America (and later on, South America) and founded the ill-fated Roanoke colony in Virginia. He acted a privateer against Spanish ships in the Caribbean, played a minor role in the defense of England during the Armada War, and eventually helped capture Cadiz. He served in three Parliaments and served as governor of Jersey. Perhaps because of his exploits, he became a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, but after Elizabeth died, he was implicated in a plot to prevent her cousin, James Stuart, from inheriting the throne. He was tried and sentenced to death, but James initially spared him. Later on, he participated in an attack on a Spanish colony, and the Spanish ambassador persuaded James to reinstate the death sentence, with the result that Raleigh was executed in 1618. Overall, he lived a life filled with colorful incidents, and his inclusion in EtGA is a reasonable one.

As I noted in my previous post, the film substantially misrepresents his contribution to the Armada War, but since I’ve already discussed that, I’ll focus in this post on the romantic sub-plot.

Early in the film, Elizabeth is being courted by various suitors, including a young Austrian prince who is obviously not a good match for the queen. (Historically, this happened much earlier in Elizabeth’s reign). Raleigh returns to court and immediately attracts the queen’s attention because of his rather more blunt and bold personal style. Unlike the Austrian prince, Raleigh is a real man, and the queen quickly finds herself being fascinated by his stories of adventure. He clearly represents a life she might have had under different circumstances.

Raleigh being typically studly.

Her intermediary with Raleigh is her lady-in-waiting, Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish). The coincidence that the queen and her handmaiden both have the same name allows the film to create a love triangle in which Elizabeth is infatuated with Raleigh, who is interested in her in return but cannot make headway with her because she refuses to marry. So instead he becomes attracted to Bess. Elizabeth herself encourages this, seeing Bess as a stand-in for herself. So in one scene, she orders Bess to practice dancing the volta with Raleigh, despite his protestations that he doesn’t know the steps. (This is clearly a call back to Elizabeth, in which the queen dances twice with the earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes), in two rather erotically-charged scenes.) But Elizabeth’s voyeuristic impulses unwittingly encourage Bess to fall in love with Raleigh. Bess gets pregnant and the couple quickly marry.

Elizabeth getting her voyeuristic freak on with Bess and Raleigh

The problem with this as that since Bess is legally Elizabeth’s ward, it is illegal for her to marry without Elizabeth’s permission. When Elizabeth learns the truth, she furiously beats Bess, expressing both her sexual jealousy and her sense of betrayal. “My bitches wear my collars!” she shouts. The queen imprisons Raleigh, only agreeing to let him out to help fight the Spanish. By the end of the film she has forgiven them. She visits them after the birth of their son, giving him her blessing in a scene that makes it clear she thinks of the baby as the son she cannot have.

The facts here are basically correct, but the chronology is wrong. Raleigh and Throckmorton only married in 1591, three years after the events of the film. Their son died in infancy, and the clandestine marriage remained secret for about another year before Elizabeth got word of it. Both were imprisoned, and Raleigh was released to help in a different campaign against the Spanish.

Overall, this is probably the most accurate portion of the film. All the basic facts are right, and the adjustment of the chronology to make it coincide with the Armada War is not too outrageous. The major problem is that the film assumes that he was Elizabeth’s favorite because she was sexually attracted to him. While that’s certainly possible, there isn’t any special reason to assume that it is so, and it’s another example of Hollywood films reducing the complexities of history to simple romantic relationships. Given that Elizabeth was in her mid-50s by the time of the film, the prospect of a romantic relationship between Elizabeth and Raleigh is a bit unrealistic (although, obviously, older women can certainly develop romantic or sexual fixations), but the fact that Blanchett was in her late 30s when she made this film helps get around that. Presumably Kapur concluded that no one wanted to see a woman in her mid-50s playing a woman in her mid-50s.

Blanchett at Elizabeth, in one of many great, if somewhat improbable, gowns

Just Because She’s a Queen Doesn’t Mean She Knows How to Govern

In a previous post, I pointed out the ways that Elizabeth undermines the historical Queen Elizabeth I’s agency. It pretty much attributes most of her success to the efforts of Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) while suggesting that her historically-accurate indecisiveness about her marriage was a result of a personal inability to make decisions about her husband. And EtGA unfortunately does the same thing. Elizabeth spends much of the film mooning over Raleigh and then getting viciously angry when another woman beds and marries him. On one level it’s an interesting exploration of the conflicted feelings Elizabeth might have felt about her situation, but on another level it’s demeaning to suggest that one of the most powerful women of her day (perhaps the most powerful) spent most of her time acting like a lovesick cheerleader. The film makes even less effort than Elizabeth to explain that Elizabeth’s decision to remain single was the result of political factors at least as much as personal ones. It’s not especially clear in this film why she can’t marry Raleigh, so the viewer is left to assume that she’s just a fussy woman.

Elizabeth in a stunning gown

On its own, this might not be too serious an issue. As I said, this is an interesting exploration of the feelings the historical Elizabeth might actually have experienced. But Kapur again combines this plot with a political plot in which Elizabeth is almost entirely reliant on men. The main plot is the Babington Plot, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the Armada War, and Elizabeth is almost entirely passive in this plot. She is the object of the assassination plot, and survives purely because actually killing her is not the true goal of the plot. Walsingham is the active figure in that part of the plot, ferreting out what’s going on and then working to persuade the queen that she owes a duty to her people to execute Mary. During the Armada War, Elizabeth is wracked with fears about her death, and Raleigh has to teach her how to be courageous, after which point she mans up, dons her armor and delivers the film’s rather weak version of the Tilbury Speech, which strips out most of the speech’s stony determination. Elizabeth spent her formative teen years under constant threat during her sister’s reign and was a periodic target of assassination plots for much of her life; the idea that she didn’t know how to manage her own fear is absurd, but that’s what the film is telling us.

Elizabeth in another stunning gown

The historical Elizabeth was definitely indecisive. She spent years refusing to decide who she would marry, and spent years after that refusing to formally designate her heir (in fact, she may never have made an explicit statement on the subject). She was deeply reluctant to execute Mary Stuart and Walsingham was smart enough to recognize that she needed help taking that step. But while indecision may have been a personal trait, there were also very powerful political reasons for her to not want to take decisive action on issues where there could be no turning back once certain actions had been taken. EtGA hints at the complexity of issues around Mary Stuart when Raleigh observes “Kill a queen and all queens are mortal.” But even here the film implies that the issue is Elizabeth’s inability to acknowledge her own mortality, rather than her understanding that her political position was stronger when her subjects saw her as being more than human.

Elizabeth in yet another stunning gown

The film offers one other moment intended to reveal her personal feelings. After being out in public all dressed up, she sits in front of a mirror, takes off her wig, and contemplates the fact that she’s aging and starting to have wrinkles. I think this was intended to explore the contrast between her glamorous political persona and the reality of her humanity, but it has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the notion that women are primarily concerned about their physical appearance and not growing old. And the fact that Blanchett looks remarkable good for a woman who’s supposed to be in her mid-50s just reinforces the unreasonable beauty standards Hollywood forces on women.

Elizabeth in a stunning..fairy cosplay outfit?

Most films about historical leaders take at least some effort to explore the political issues they dealt with. Imagine, if you will, a film about George Washington in which his only motive for fighting the British was his love for Martha, or a film in which Winston Churchill was fighting World War II out of a sense of sexual rivalry with Adolf Hitler. In Braveheart, Wallace at least claims that his rebellion is about “freedom”, whatever he means by that. And yet, in this film, with its female leader, the politics virtually vanish or are given into the hands of men, and the queen is mostly driven by personal motives revolving around her frustrated sexual desires and her inability to make up her mind about anything that matters.

After watching this film, I think one could be forgiven for assuming that Elizabeth’s primary historical significance is that she had really great fashion sense and knew how to get the best camera angles, and not that she was one of the most effective and consequential rulers in British history. Second-wave feminists insisted that the personal is political, but in this film, the political is all personal.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Elizabeth has been the subject of dozens of biographies, many of them not very good. For a current scholarly view of her, try David Loades’ Elizabeth I.

If you’re interested in Sir Walter Raleigh, you might think about getting Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend(Kindle edition).

Elizabeth: The Golden Age: There’s Something about Mary (Stuart, That Is)

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Babington Plot, Cate Blanchett, Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, Samantha Morton, Shekhar Kapur, Tudor England

In 2007, Shekhar Kapur returned to the life of Queen Elizabeth I, making Elizabeth: the Golden Age as a sequel Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur). The film brought back Cate Blanchett in the title role and Geoffrey Rush as her loyal spymaster Francis Walsingham, and added Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh. Despite the fact that the two films were shot in a very similar style, had the same director, and had Michael Hirst, the screenwriter from the first film assisting with the script, EtGA did much more poorly at the box office, not even breaking into the top 100 films of the year, whereas Elizabeth was 65 the year it was released, and its lifetime gross has been less than half the first film’s. It also received much less love from the critics. In an overall sense, it’s actually better history, because it hews a little more closely to the facts than Elizabeth did, although that’s not really saying that much.

The Babington Plot

Like Elizabeth, EtGA intertwines the story of Elizabeth I’s love life (or lack thereof) with a story about a Catholic plot to depose her and Walsingham’s efforts to protect her. In fact, it actually recycles part of the first film’s plot. Elizabeth features a plot against the queen that is a composite of the actual Ridolfi and Babington Plots, with the Jesuit John Ballard featuring as the assassin. EtGA shows us the Babington Plot somewhat more accurately, but since John Ballard was already killed in the first film, they decided to rename the Jesuit orchestrater of the plot Robert Reston.

The historical Babington Plot involved a Catholic effort to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her on the throne with her Catholic cousin Mary I of Scotland, who had been captured and held in genteel confinement in England for 19 years. Walsingham understood that Mary was the focus of numerous plots, since as Elizabeth’s closest living relative she was naturally a factor in Catholic plots to remove Elizabeth. Her letters show that Mary was extremely well-informed about multiple conspiracies, but Elizabeth was deeply reluctant to take action against Mary. Since Mary was a crowned queen in her own right, executing her would provide precedent for executing Elizabeth, and it would undermine the mystique that Elizabeth felt was essential to her rule. Walsingham tried without success to get his queen to take decisive action about her cousin.

So when Walsingham captured an English Catholic named Gilbert Gifford who was conspiring to assassinate Elizabeth, he saw an opportunity to eliminate Mary. Gifford agreed to act as a double agent. He met with Mary and arranged to have letters smuggled to her in beer barrels.

As the plot developed, it came to focus around a wealthy Catholic named Anthony Babington, who was in what he thought was secret coded communication with Mary via those beer barrels, never realizing that Gifford and another member of the plot were letting Walsingham decode and read the letters. The Jesuit priest John Ballard was working to gain Spanish agreement to launch an invasion on England in Mary’s name, while Babington was being maneuvered to win Mary’s assent to a scheme in which Babington was to assassinate Elizabeth, Mary would be rescued from confinement, and then placed on the throne. Mary eventually sent Babington a letter laying out what she saw as necessary for any plot to rescue her from captivity. This letter on its own was probably enough to implicate Mary in the whole plot, but one of the spies copied it and added a postscript in which Mary appeared to agree to the effort to kill Elizabeth. That was enough to let Walsingham arrest Ballard and Babington, who were subsequently executed.

Mary Queen of Scots

The Execution of Mary

Mary was put on trial in 1586, based on a Bond of Association passed by the Privy Council in 1584. This bond, which Mary among many others signed, allowed for the execution of anyone in the line of succession (read: Mary) who was aware of any plot to kill the queen, even if they were not actively involved in the plotting. Parliament followed this up with an Act of Association that provided for the execution of anyone who stood to benefit from a plot against the queen. So despite Mary’s insistence that she was not subject to English law, and despite the fact (or rather because of the fact) that she was allowed neither legal counsel nor defense witnesses nor access to the evidence against her, Mary was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

Elizabeth hesitated to sign the death warrant. She understood that executing Mary would certainly outrage France and Spain, and would remove one of the few active deterrents to a Catholic invasion. She also recognized that it would be very hard for her to control the perceptions and meaning of the execution. Nevertheless, driven by pressure from both Walsingham and the general English population, she eventually gave in and reluctantly signed the warrant. (Walsingham reported eased her discomfort by including the warrant in a stack of other documents that needed her signature.) Then Walsingham conveniently ‘fell ill’, leaving it up to a deputy to dispatch the warrant to Mary’s jailer. Elizabeth was furious at the poor deputy for having sent the warrant without her permission; like Walsingham’s illness, this too was probably a fiction, to provide her with some degree of deniability.

Mary’s last letter shows her being at peace with her impending death, and understanding herself as a Catholic martyr. The execution itself, in February of 1587, was less clean than was desired. The executioner failed to deliver a clean blow and had to take a second stroke. Her pet dog ran up to the body and got itself covered in her blood. When her head was held up, her wig either slipped off or was pulled off (accounts differ), revealing that she had gone grey (Mary, like Elizabeth, was well-known for her red hair). In later Catholic propaganda these details were elaborated to make the execution seem even more horrific than it was; it was claimed that the executioner took three strokes to kill her, so that her death was more like the torture of an early Christian martyr. The dog supposedly howled loudly and ran about the room getting blood everywhere. When the executioner picked up the head, he supposedly grabbed the wig by mistake, so that the head fell out and rolled across the floor. Elizabeth’s concerns were proven correct; she could not control the propaganda generated by the execution, and it triggered the Spanish Armada the next year.

The Death of Mary Queen of Scots

The Plot and Execution in Elizabeth: the Golden Age

EtGA follows the basic facts of the Babington plot, but it does make a few key changes. As noted, Ballard was renamed so as not to conflict with the first movie. The film lays out the messages being smuggled to Mary in beer barrels and Walsingham’s monitoring of the plot, although how he discovers the plot is wrong. In the film, he simply arrests some Catholics who give him the lead he needs; also his (I think fictitious) brother William is a Catholic entangled in the plot.

In reality, the plot never got anywhere near coming to fruition, but in the film, Babington (Eddie Redmayne) bursts into Elizabeth’s chapel and draws a pistol. He hesitates to shoot her but eventually pulls the trigger. It’s unclear at first but eventually it emerges that he was given a pistol that was loaded with powder but no bullet.

Redmayne as Babington, pointing his pistol at Elizabeth

The assassination attempt gives Walsingham enough leverage to persuade Elizabeth to try and execute Mary (Samantha Morton, in a very small but moving performance). Elizabeth is shown waffling before the trial, and has to be persuaded by Walsingham that she has a duty to protect her people by execution Mary. Elizabeth eventually agrees and Mary is put on trial and executed. The emphasis is mostly on the execution, which is shown without anyone of the unpleasantness. The sequence is quite sympathetic to Mary, who appears serene as she goes to her death, whereas Elizabeth is shown to be deeply agitated.

Morton as Mary; note that red is the liturgical color of martyrs.

Perhaps the biggest change that the film makes, however, comes immediately after the execution. Philip II of Spain declares war on England, and Walsingham suddenly realizes that Philip was behind the whole plot in the first place., because the Spanish king has been reading Mary’s correspondence. Babington’s gun was unloaded so that Elizabeth would survive, execute Mary and give Philip the justification to invade. Walsingham begs the queen’s forgiveness for misunderstanding the whole situation, and Elizabeth admits that she has erred in executing Mary.

Upon examination, this plot doesn’t work. If Elizabeth had been assassinated, Mary would have automatically become queen, and there would have been no need for a Spanish invasion. Executing Mary was the last thing Philip wanted to happen, because it meant that there was no Catholic heir to the throne (the new heir, Mary’s son James, having been raised as a Protestant), which would make controlling England after the conquest a bigger problem, since there is no Catholic heir to put on the throne as a Spanish puppet (although as the widower of Elizabeth’s older sister Mary I, Philip had his own very weak claim). Had Philip simply been waiting for an excuse, Mary’s imprisonment would probably have been enough on its own. In actuality, the execution of Mary forced Philip to take action when he was probably reluctant to do so.

Furthermore, Babington never actually attempted to shoot Elizabeth, and it’s not clear how Philip would have been able to read Mary’s correspondence, since it was passing through Walsingham’s hands.

So the film essentially inverts the relationship between the execution of Mary Stuart and the Spanish invasion. The actual invasion was a reaction to Mary’s execution, whereas in the film, the execution is part of the scheme to set up the invasion. What the film gets right is the broad sequence of events, showing how the Babington Plot led to Mary’s death, which in turn led to the Armada War. With the exception of the detail about the pistol being unloaded as part of a deeper plot, the film’s changes to history are mostly in the way of simplifying the complex details of the plot and making the narrative  clear to the audience. In that sense, I think this part of the film works better as history than Elizabeth does. But as we shall see next time, there are other problems with EtGA.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Like biographies about Elizabeth I, there are a lot of not very good biographies of Mary Stuart. John Guy’s biography on Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuartis probably definitive for scholarly works. But if you’re not up for 600+ pages, try Rosalind K. Marshall’s much shorter Mary Queen of Scots: Truth or Lies(Kindle edition), which focuses on answering the key questions about this famous but somewhat misunderstood woman. The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History & Culture)is a short classroom textbook that addresses her trial and execution and offers the primary sources for those events.

Elizabeth: Dissing Queen Bess

Tags

16th Century England, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Shekhar Kapur, Tudor England

I mentioned in my previous post on Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur) that the film reduces the complex political issues around Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) marriage choices to a question of personal interest. Her indecisiveness is depicted entirely as Elizabeth wavering between a man she loves but knows is unsuitable and a repugnant suitor who would be a good choice politically. While her personal feelings were probably an issue in her choice, the real reason for her refusal to commit was she recognized that whichever choice she made would bring with it at least as many problems as advantages. There was no truly good choice for Elizabeth to make, so she changed the terms of the problem and made refusing to choose the best option. Doing this forced her to endure substantial pressure from her Privy Council, her Parliaments, and other European monarchs, as well as to defy social convention, so her choice required her to develop a variety of strategies for successfully managing this pressure.

Blanchett as Elizabeth

In other words, Elizabeth refused to choose a husband because she was an extremely savvy politician, not because she was an indecisive woman, and the way she enacted her choice demonstrated considerable finesse. So by downplaying the political issues and emphasizing her personal feelings, the film strips Elizabeth of much of her political skill and replaces it with a set of issues straight out of a rom-com. In a serious historical film, it’s degrading to one of the most intelligent people ever to sit on the English throne to depict her as little better than Kate Hudson or Drew Barrymore looking for love.

And unfortunately, the film does this fairly consistently. The film only shows her engaging in one piece of actual politics, when she works to persuade the English Parliament to pass the Act of Uniformity that helped resolve the kingdom’s religious problems. In the film, we see her struggling to craft and memorize a political speech that will win over the bishops in particular. On its own, this would be an interesting moment, but when time comes to give the speech, she remains hesitant and off-balance. Gradually she finds her feet, but even at the end of the speech, she doesn’t seem truly confident. We know from many sources, including her speeches, that Elizabeth was an extremely skilled public speaker. She may well have been less skilled at giving speeches when she was early in her reign, but the film never shows us a moment when her oratorical skills truly shine, which leaves the audience with the impression that she was not a gifted speech-maker.

Furthermore, during the speech the camera cuts to six Catholic bishops who are locked in a cellar somewhere, and therefore unable to participate in the voting. (This never happened.) Eventually, it is revealed that Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) is responsible for this, and that Elizabeth won the vote by five votes; if Walsingham hadn’t intervened, Elizabeth would have lost the vote. So according to the film, Elizabeth only triumphed on this issue because Walsingham secretly stacked the deck for her, and not because she skillfully managed the members of Parliament and the bishops to win their support.

As the film constructs its narrative, at the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth is a very emotional woman who lacks inner strength and is easily distressed by the difficulties she encounters. In many of her difficult moments, she requires the intervention of a man to calm her and stiffen her resolve. When her Privy Council bullies her into war with Scotland, Walsingham advises against it, and he proves right. Later on, it is Walsingham who teaches her that she needs to be more ruthless with her enemies, and it is Walsingham who tells her that she has to do without love. So as the film structures events, one of the greatest rulers in English history wouldn’t have been great at all if she hadn’t had a man standing behind her advising her how to win and occasionally intervening to ensure her triumph.

Rush as Walsingham

This is simply untrue. Elizabeth showed great political skill and savvy during the years of her sister Mary’s reign, when a wrong step could easily have gotten her executed. She prudently dissembled about her religious beliefs and at least nominally embraced Catholicism until she was able to admit she was a Protestant after she became queen. So she didn’t need Walsingham to teach her how to be an effective politician.

Additionally, Walsingham didn’t really become an important figure in Elizabeth’s government until the late 1560s, by which point she had already been in power for more than a decade, and had managed to enact the Act of Uniformity, begin dealing with the issue of her marriage, and confront the French build-up in Scotland; while the Scottish campaign was poorly conducted, it achieved her main goal of getting the French to withdraw most of their forces from Scotland. In all of these matters, Elizabeth generally set her own policy, often to the frustration of the men on her Privy Council. There is no doubt that Elizabeth was a skilled politician even at the start of her reign.

And then there’s the fact that for much of the second half of the film, the main plot revolves around a plot to kill Elizabeth that requires Walsingham to keep her safe. For a movie about Queen Elizabeth, the story is surprisingly dependent on the actions of men.  Indeed, in one scene, the assassin Ballard (Daniel Craig) catches her alone and gets within about 20 feet or so of her. Elizabeth is presented as helplessly demanding that he tell her his name; had other events not created a distraction, Ballard clearly would have killed her. This moment contrasts sharply with a real assassination attempt that she survived. In 1584, Elizabeth was surprised alone in her garden by Dr. William Perry, a member of Parliament and one of her spies, who had decided to kill her. But he was so daunted by her presence that he was unable to carry out the deed. (At least this is how some sources describe the incident; others suggest that he was trying to get her attention to raise his standing with her.) The notion that she was a helpless woman in the face of violence is false.

Elizabeth surviving an assassination attempt (note the emphasis on her fear)

For the film to undermine her accomplishments and attribute them to a man is, sadly, pure sexism. It feels as though the screenwriter, Michael Hirst, and Shekhar Kapur simply couldn’t imagine a strong political woman who wasn’t dependent on a man. If there was ever a woman who wasn’t dependent on men for her success, it was Queen Elizabeth I. Her story is one of a woman successfully navigating a male-dominated world and rising above the limitations men attempted to place on her. That’s a story I would much rather have seen than the one this film gives us.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is available on Amazon.

If you’d like to know more about Sir Francis Walsingham and his espionage efforts, try, The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I.