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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Breathtaking historical romance - with the history taken out, 14 Jun 2008
Cate Blanchet is probably the finest Hollywood actress of her generation and holds this slightly ramshackle epic together through the sheer fire-and-honey intensity of her portrayal of the Virgin Queen. Clive Owen is a dashing - if perhaps overly louche - Raleigh, and the film chooses to focus on the sexual and romantic paradox of their relationship.
This focus is regrettable, since many more interesting things are going on at the time, like, oh, the Armada, the Babington plot - things that the film gives short shrift too, preferring to linger over Raleigh's droopy eyelids and Queen Bess' palpitations. Also, in order to compress everything into a tidy romantic plotline incorporating all the Hollywood touchstones (first meeting... flirtation... misunderstanding... reconciliation... the KISS) the sort of concessions to historical truth made by the first film get thrown out of the window.
But these grumblings need to be set in context. After all, this movie isn't really in the same category as Braveheart [1995] (which stands in the same relationship to the historical wars between England and Scotland as The Lord of the Rings Trilogy does to the history of the First Crusade). This film is both beautiful and moving and, if it doesn't manage to be a history lesson, it certainly conveys an inspirational IMPRESSION of history. No small thanks here must go to the third star of the film: the architectural heritage of Britain. Director Kapur artfully converts the cathedrals at Ely, Wells and Winchester into peerless sets of late Gothic romance, traced through with his trademark delight in light and shadow. Recurring motifs are views through arches, windows and from lofty ceilings: dizzying angles that spotlight the characters as frantic mortals adrift in an unchanging world of eternal stone. Not bad.
This motif is picked up again in the dialogue, which sparkles here a little more brightly than in the first film. Raleigh is presented as the rootless adventurer in a delightful exchange about his Atlantic crossing; Elizabeth's love traps him on land and at court - a neat parallel to her entrapment in the power politics of Renaissance monarchy. The process by which the queen discovers her identity as an ever-virgin icon, a mother to the nation, is strikingly mapped out and, frankly, no woman ever looked better in full Gothic plate armour than Blanchet's Elizabeth at Tilbury - a rare case of the film improving on history, since the actual Elizabeth only went as far as a silver cuirass.
Geoffrey Rush is in loyal support as the devoted spymaster Walsingham and Samantha Morton certainly looks the part as Mary Stuart (though why oh why did they have to give her an anachronistic Scottish accent?) as does Rhys Ifans in evil Catholic mode, effectively rehashing Daniel Craig's psycho-papist from the earlier movie.
With the cast looking great and the locations looking greater, it's curious what the film chooses to ignore. OK, so the "I will not make windows into men's souls" line was used (inappropriately) in the first film, but its absence in the opening privy council scene feels like a gaping wound in the script. And sure, Francis Drake probably didn't insist on finishing his game of bowls at Plymouth Hoe before sailing out to engage the Armada, but it's part of the historical myth and its exclusion feels a little odd, as does the whole relegation of Drake's character in favour of the raffish Raleigh.
Most regrettably, why did the film-makers set an armoured Elizabeth pepping up the yeomanry at Tilbury but skip her deathless exhortation: "I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too!". Did it not fit in with the P.C. subtext of feminine empowerment? Without such a rallying cry, Queenie's speech sounds rather more like the captain of the Upper VI girls hockey team, less like the daughter of Henry VIII.
The Armada is sunk in a dreamlike sequence that sits appropriately with the Queen's-eye vantage point the film adopts, but rather cheats those of us lusting for nautical mayhem and the splintering of Spanish timbers. Nevertheless, the Dons go down into the drink, Raleigh is banished to a domestic shipwreck of a life in exile in Sherborne and Elizabeth finds her radiant apotheosis.
A beautiful and thoughtful film then, flawed only by its subsitution of a Mills & Boon romance for truthful historical events which were, ironically, even more interesting.
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21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Up To Its Predecessor, 11 Feb 2008
Criticising this film, as some have, for lacking historical verisimilitude is on a par with doing the same to Black Adder's Queenie. This isn't a history lesson; it's entertainment. Similar things have been done to our other mythic ruler, Arthur, without the fuss.
Where I would criticise it is in failing to rise to the expectations set by Cate Blanchett's original appearance as Good Queen Bess, an entertainment in itself but also an excellent essay in Machiavellian politics, with Geoffrey Rush's Walsingham a masterly portrait of the spymaster, enforcer and advisor, shaping what was merely promising material at the start into a fully functioning Renaissance monarch.
This second outing for Blanchett and Rush lacks that edge. Sure, it's entertaining, and there's some not-bad CGI as the Spanish Armada meets its fiery end. But the one serious message I could detect was in Elizabeth's reluctance to clamp down on her Catholic subjects on the premise that such repression would make their rebellion a self-fulfilling prophecy. The parallels with Islam in the current era are obvious, and the message is one even Season 6 of 24 carries!
Elizabeth's agony over the decision to execute Mary Queen of Scots unfortunately does no more than make her look deranged rather than distraught, and her infatuation with Clive Owen's Raleigh is not much more than a limp crowd pleaser, where Joseph Fiennes's Dudley in the original played almost the symbolic role of a youth rejected - something like Henry V's Falstaff. Also missing is an adversary to match the menace of Christopher Ecclestone's Norfolk - King Philip comes over as a bit of a hubristic buffoon.
So, whilst Elizabeth wins a place in my top-whatever movies of all time, its sequel will take a backseat amongst the movies I've also watched and found merely entertaining.
I dunno. Maybe I'm taking this all too seriously?
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Let's go living in the past, 2 Feb 2008
I had some reservations about this film before venturing to see it at the cinema. The rating, PG-13, was lower than the R the first movie had which brought a degree of trepidation about the content being watered down. As well as that I wondered if it would indeed be possible to achieve the degree of excellence which the first film had met.
Having watched this film again several times on DVD I believe that although the current film has not achieved the same degree of oppulent excellence as the first it has come pretty close. It is clear that the lower rating is intended to attract a wider audience and the naughtiness which abounded in the first film is still there in the second although not so obvious.
Both films display a degree of enlightenment of how to perceive the past. Others have characterised the Elizabeth films as mere historical dramas and romances and to a degree those perceptions are correct insofar as the settings go. However, this is, to me at least, a superficial interpretation but other perspectives have greater strength.
Growing up in England, I was exposed to wonderful television programmes and films which depicted a historical portrayal of merrie olde Englande which was very historically inaccurate. I used to believe that the grimy industrial England portrayed by Dickens amongst others was an inferior time of high infant mortality, short live spans and very Hobbesian in nature. Until, that is, I discovered that Dickens was paid by the word and to keep his readers interested he portrayed the country in such a way that they would crave for more. Simialrly, closer examination of merrie olde Englande showed that it was not very merry at all.
In conjunction with that, history of human sexuality was largely began from Victorian times with their sense of prudishness and repression and it has been falsely claimed that much of current life was non-existant before so-called modern times.
Viewed from these perspectives both films shed a different light on events of Elizabethan times. Elizabeth is not a single strong woman, she is a survivor against men who resent her grip on power. She was, like Margaret Thatcher, the strongest "man" of her time. Similarly the record of the times showed that although there were certain societal rules which needed to be followed, they were often broken but unless they were discovered and exposed they continued. Feints within feints as Frank Herbert would write in Dune.
What I love about these films, aside from their radical perspective on past events and the personalities of the time, is their focus on intrigue and plots. The machinations of the Catholic Church as exemplified by Philip of Spain in the battle to prevent the supremacy of the Anglican church from occuring, the jockeying for power utilising religion as a front, the godfather ruthlessness of the time and indeed the correlation with the penultimate scenes of that movie, all within times which were supposedly much simpler than our own.
Ultimately though Elizabeth is human, a woman, a woman of strength who subborns her own needs and desires to those of her country. Elizabeth the consumate politician. Is this a story of Elizabeth I or the current monarch residing on the throne of the United KIngdom? Sometimes one wonders, not least in the role of the closest of her advisers.
There is much for thought and entertainment in this film. Blanchett's performance is stunning once more and Clive Owen has come a long way since his Chancer days. All in all this is an excellent film and will be judged as such in the longer term.
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