Elizabeth is not nearly as bad as one expects it to be. Perhaps I have Gladiator to thank for the fact that I was not the least bit troubled by the historical inaccuracies of the film. After watching a Roman emperor pit himself against a wounded-general-turned-seasoned-gladiator in a packed coliseum, I find I somehow lack the energy to work myself into any kind of outraged froth over such details as anachronistic theological disputes and the misrepresentation of genealogical claims to the English throne.

Although Elizabeth doesn’t make for a perfect history lesson, it makes for an adequate historical drama. Moreover, considered from the perspective of literary precedent, the writer of Elizabeth did no more harm to history than Shakespeare did by making Hotspur roughly the same age as Prince Hal in Henry IV.

While I suppose such comparisons must seem tedious to all of those who are not familiar with Shakespeare’s histories (not to mention most of us who are), I would have to say that Elizabeth’s screenwriter (Michael Hirst) goes out of his way to invite them; for the story of Elizabeth, according to the movie, is one of the self-conscious reconfiguration of a sovereign.

In Shakespeare’s plays, Prince Hal, who cavorted as a playboy in his youth, managed to consolidate his power (once king) through his sudden transformation into a serious, diligent, and effective monarch. Similarly, Elizabeth begins as something of a self-indulgent brat. After sending an army of children to a massacre in Scotland, she is rather easily distracted by the affection of Lord Robert Dudley and muses to herself that being an unmarried queen is so much fun that she can’t quite see the point of being married. (As she leers ravenously around her ballroom at the many men who see her as the most desirable female in the world, we are reminded of the recurring line Mel Brooks gives to Louis XIV in The History of the World: “It’s good to be the king.”) I only wish that I could claim to understand the transformation Elizabeth undergoes in the film as well as I was able to follow that undergone by Prince Hal, who makes a practical joke out of highway robbery (in Henry IV, Part 1) and later becomes the “mirror of Christian kings” (in Henry V).

Of course, nothing is more predictable (or tiresome) than turning a drama about Elizabeth into an opportunity to spot allusions to a certain Elizabethan dramatist, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief and put the Shakespeare aside for more important considerations: costuming and the Corleones.

I am generally reluctant to watch films about English royalty because, more often than not, such films take The Lion in Winter as their model. As nearly as I can tell, films such as The Lion in Winter are designed for people who are extraordinarily bored and repressed and who would like nothing better than to costume themselves like dukes and cardinals and princes and dauphins and hurl nasty barbs at each other over glasses of wine while their armies quash one another on the field. I absolutely cannot abide films that rely entirely on the audience’s desire to play dress-up. They are every bit as yawn-inducing to me as re-enactments of Civil War battles. And somehow, these dress-up movies always end up turning into soap operas (which induce even more yawns than Civil War re-enactments).

But even though the politicking and backstabbing and double-crossing of Elizabeth could fairly be described as soap operatic, it could not fairly be called non-stop soap opera. The director actually turns the dramatic instensity down from time to time and allows the film to catch its breath and the characters to take stock of themselves. All of the characters appeared to act out of some sort of comprehensible motive—not simply the need to be the villain. And despite the fact that the costuming was taken as seriously as it always is in period pieces, I never felt that the film relied on the costumes in order to hold my attention. The focus was always on the characters, particularly Elizabeth, who turned out to be a rather interesting sixteenth-century version of Michael Corleone.

Like Michael Corleone, Elizabeth finds that there are problems that come with being appointed the head of an influential family. Just as Michael did, she discovers that she has many enemies, including, in some cases, some of the people who are closest to her. (I think Sir Robert was named Sir Fredo in the original script.) She has an excellent and reliable consigliere in Walsingham (played by Geoffrey Rush, since Robert Duvall was unavailable), and allows her enemies to grow ever more threatening until near the end of the film, when she suddenly decides to hit everyone who is against her at the same time. The relief that the viewer feels in seeing the heads of her many enemies all rolling at once is precisely akin to the relief we feel for the Corleone family at the end of all the Godfather movies.

For the whole film, things just seemed to be getting harder and harder for Elizabeth. Like Coppola before him, director Shekhar Kapur makes us feel as if the walls are really closing in on the protagonist, as if it is becoming more and more difficult for her to breathe, and as if the only appropriate response for our heroine is to lash out as violently and viciously as she can.

But when she does, the film begins to feel a little stale—as if we’ve seen it maybe once or twice (or even three times) before. So the script goes off on a tangent and tries to salvage itself by introducing a theme: the theme of Elizabeth’s virginity. She contemplates a statue of the Virgin Mary as she has what we are to understand is an incredibly significant discussion with Walsingham. “They died for her,” she says as she caresses the stone monument.

“And they haven’t found anyone to replace her,” says Walsingham. So Elizabeth cuts her hair, proclaims herself a virgin, and coats herself in a strange makeup that makes her look, if not like marble, then like alabaster. Even though the evidence doesn’t seem to support such a reading, I guess it turns out that when she stood up for the Church of England earlier in the film, it was all part of some plan that she had to bill herself as the Anglican version of the Catholic virgin—with nationalism as the centerpiece of her new theology. Unlike the Virgin Mary (seen by many as being wedded to God, if I understand things correctly), Elizabeth proclaims that she is “married to England.”

In its final minutes the film does an extraordinary job of probing the possibility that England’s virgin queen succeeded with her countrymen precisely by offering herself up as a replacement for the Holy Mother. It’s the kind of theme that might have made the film interesting throughout if it hadn’t simply popped up at the end. But earlier, in her efforts to pass the “Unification Act” (which calls for nationwide Protestantism), she wins the argument more on the basis of her charm as a playgirl than as a martyr to her faith. “And who would you suggest I marry?” she asks parliament, laughing. “Some say the King of Spain. Some say the Duke of Anjou. And some can’t abide foreigners at all. I suppose the only way to please everyone would be for me to marry one of each.”

In that scene, she comes across as charmingly scandalous, as it is an open secret that she routinely sleeps with Lord Robert Dudley, a married man. I guess what troubles me is that the film really missed out on an opportunity to explain to me how she went from being that impetuous charmer (the Prince Hal of Henry IV, Part 1) to the austere sovereign (who knew that Falstaff’s companion would be able to deliver that speech at Agincourt in Henry V?) at the end of the film. The simple contemplation of a statue doesn’t quite seem enough of an explanation to me. In fact, the whole transformation seemed like little more than an afterthought.

If so, it was an afterthought that helped to make a reasonably interesting film just a bit more interesting. Even though I was a little disappointed by the conclusion, I was glad I finally got around to seeing a film that I had expected to be disappointed by throughout.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older