Elizabeth (1998) Review
8/10
Three Protestants are burned in the opening minutes, badly, at length. A young woman is under arrest in a country that’s just executed people for what she believes. Her sister dies and she inherits a treasury with nothing in it and a council that doesn’t want her. She’s twenty-five, has been declared illegitimate, has a Catholic claimant with French backing across the border in Scotland, and the film establishes all three facts before anybody calls her Your Majesty.
What grabs me about Elizabeth is that it cares more about the paperwork of power than about the crown. Blanchett is the reason I’d sit through it again, and Kapur’s refusal to make a pretty costume drama is the reason I respect it. My complaints are about the last act, where the history gets sloppy, and a few scenes lit so dark I couldn’t make out what was happening.
The 8 is for a film that treats a coronation as a hostile takeover. Every scene is about who has votes, who controls money, who can be bought, and who will be alive next month, and almost nothing in it is about romance.
What holds it below higher is historical compression that becomes carelessness in the last act, and a visual scheme that occasionally tips from atmospheric into murky.
Remi Adefarasin shot it and was nominated, and the approach is almost entirely available and candle light. That produces real atmosphere and several sequences where the audience can’t see what’s happening.
The cathedral interiors were shot largely at Durham and the palace material at Alnwick and Raby. It gives the film real stone in every frame and is most of the reason a fifteen-million-dollar production looks the way it does.
It Is a Thriller About Committees
The film’s structural insight is that the interesting part of a reign is the first eighteen months, when nobody has decided whether to obey. The council scenes are the picture’s real subject. Men who served her sister, hold offices she can’t remove, control revenue she needs, and are corresponding with foreign powers about replacing her.
The film is also specific about the money. The treasury is empty, the coinage is debased, the French are being paid off, and several council scenes are arguments about what the crown can really afford this year.
Kapur shoots them as conspiracy. Long tables, whispered conversations in corridors, information arriving late, and people who manage the queen while they also negotiate her removal.
The Act of Uniformity sequence is the purest example, and it’s my favorite stretch of the film. It’s a parliamentary vote.
She needs a majority, doesn’t have one, arranges for two bishops to be detained so they can’t attend, and wins by three. The film treats the arithmetic of a three-vote margin as the climax of its entire first half, and I found it more gripping than most battle scenes.
That approach is why the film works and it’s rare in the costume form. Most historical drama is about feelings in expensive rooms, and this one is about whether a specific bill will pass.
Power at the moment of transition is the most dramatic period available and almost nobody writes it. Nobody has decided whether to obey yet. That means every instruction is a test. The established reign is stable and therefore dull. Write the first eighteen months. Procedural detail makes power legible. A vote count, a revenue figure or a correspondence intercepted does more than any assertion of authority.
Have the people managing your protagonist also be negotiating against her. That double position is available in any institution and it produces scenes with two layers.
Christopher Eccleston plays Norfolk as the clearest version of it. He’s on the council, is openly contemptuous of her, is corresponding with Rome, and behaves in her presence as somebody who expects to outlast her.
Blanchett Builds a Person and Then Removes Her
The performance is a progression, and it has to be, because the film’s argument is that Elizabeth became a construction deliberately. Blanchett’s work here is what I’d point anybody to first, and I think the rest of the film is built to serve it.
The early scenes are a young woman who’s frightened, laughs easily, is in love, and is visibly out of her depth in council. Blanchett plays all of that without any suggestion of a queen waiting inside. The dancing scene is the marker for it. She’s young, is enjoying herself, is openly in love in front of a court that’s watching, and the film places it early so the last act has something to remove.
The turn is placed carefully. She practises a speech alone, repeatedly, in an empty chamber, getting the cadence right, and the film shows her constructing an address the way an actor would.
The mirror is the object the film uses for the transition. She looks at herself before the practice and after the whitening, and the film lets the audience make the comparison instead of cutting them together. The coronation is staged against that. She’s carried, arranged, positioned and dressed by other people while barely moving, and the sequence establishes that the office is a thing done to somebody before it’s a thing they hold. The final sequence is the removal. Hair cut, face whitened, voice flattened, and a statement that she’s married to England, and Blanchett plays the last ten minutes as somebody who has deleted a person so that she can survive.
Geoffrey Rush
Walsingham is the film’s most interesting character and the performance is almost entirely stillness. He arrives with no stated loyalty, is competent at violence and at intelligence work, and the film never establishes why he’s on her side beyond a calculation he doesn’t explain. Rush plays him quietly and without menace. That’s the correct choice. The character is frightening because he’s unhurried, and the film gives him a sequence in the last act in which everything is resolved through a series of arrivals at people’s doors.
The Requiem under it is Mozart. It’s anachronistic by two centuries and entirely effective. The film has decided that historical accuracy in the score would serve nothing and that the audience needs to be told what kind of event this is.
That purge sequence is the film’s best construction, and it’s the scene I’d show anyone who thinks costume dramas are dull. It’s intercut, largely silent and scored with a Requiem, and the audience works out what’s been arranged while watching it happen.
Kapur was an Indian director with no Tudor background making his first English-language film. That’s part of why it looks unlike a British costume production. The interiors are dark, the compositions are low and off-center, and the palace is filmed as a fortress instead of as heritage.
A character with no declared motive who’s reliably useful is more unsettling than a stated villain. The reader keeps waiting for the calculation to change. The rule is that he must be useful. An unexplained ally who does nothing is a plot hole. Resolve a conspiracy through arrivals instead of explanations. A sequence of doors opening tells the reader the plan succeeded without anybody describing it. Score the purge against itself. Religious music over political murder is doing the film’s argument about the reign in a single choice.
Where It Takes Liberties
The history is compressed aggressively and in the last third it becomes inaccurate instead of compressed.
Norfolk’s conspiracy, Mary of Guise, the papal bull and the Ridolfi plot are moved, merged and in some cases relocated by more than a decade, and the purge that closes the film compresses about fifteen years of separate events into one night.
The Ridolfi plot in particular was 1571, more than a decade after the period the film’s ending occupies, and folding it in is the point where compression becomes invention instead of abbreviation. Some of that is defensible. A two-hour film can’t cover forty-five years, and the invention of a single decisive night is a legitimate dramatic solution to a slow political process.
The personal material is less defensible and it loses me. Elizabeth’s relationship with Dudley is given a betrayal the record doesn’t support, and the film uses it to motivate a decision she made for reasons that were entirely institutional. It’s a bigger flaw than the date shuffling because the rest of the film is so good at institutions.
That’s the standard failure of the form and it’s worth naming. A historical figure makes an institutional decision, the film can’t dramatize an institution, so it invents a personal cause, and the invention is almost always smaller than the real reason.
Shakespeare in Love
Best Actress went to Gwyneth Paltrow. Blanchett was nominated, this was her first nomination, and she won thirteen years later for Blue Jasmine. Kapur and Blanchett returned nine years later for The Golden Age, and Blanchett was nominated again. That’s the clearest evidence that a voting body will reward a performance for a role it’s already recognized once regardless of the film it now sits inside.
Paltrow against Blanchett is the comparison that matters, and I think the Academy got it wrong. Paltrow’s Viola is charming, capable and undemanding, and the performance is well judged for a light romantic comedy. Blanchett is doing a transformation across two hours that the film’s entire argument depends on, and that’s the harder and better piece of work.
The Weinstein campaign for Shakespeare in Love is the most studied Oscar operation in the Academy’s history, and it also delivered Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan. That appears separately on this page. Two of the entries on that list are the same campaign.
The film won one award, for makeup, from seven nominations. That’s the profile of a picture that was admired technically and was competing against a better-resourced campaign in every category it entered.
A transformation performance is only rewarded when the film around it’s serious. Blanchett is doing one and lost, because the competition was charm in a picture people enjoyed more. That’s the inverse of the Zellweger case elsewhere on this page. That means the rule is about which film the voters preferred.
Campaigning is a skill and it’s separate from the work. Pretending otherwise won’t help you and knowing it won’t change the outcome either.
Seven nominations and one technical win is a recognizable shape.
Everybody respected it and something else had the room. Kapur and Blanchett returned nine years later for The Golden Age. It’s a considerably worse film and shows what this one avoided. That sequel is about a woman and a costume, and this one is about a council and a treasury.
Should you watch Elizabeth?
Yes, and watch it as a political thriller instead of a costume picture. I rate it an 8 because the hostile-takeover coronation, the council scenes about vote counts and revenue, the purge resolved through doors opening and Blanchett building a young woman and then deleting her add up to the smartest film about power I know from that decade. It stops short of a 9 because the last act fudges history it didn’t need to fudge, and some of the candlelight hides the action it’s supposed to show.
