Elizabeth (1998) Review

Three Protestants are burned in the opening minutes, badly, at length. A young woman is under arrest in a country that has just executed people for what she believes. Her sister dies and she inherits a treasury with nothing in it and a council that does not want her.

She is 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.

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, which produces genuine atmosphere and several sequences where the audience cannot see what is happening.

The cathedral interiors were shot largely at Durham and the palace material at Alnwick and Raby, which 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 cannot 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 conducted as arguments about what can really be afforded this year.

Kapur shoots them as conspiracy. Long tables, whispered conversations in corridors, information arriving late, and a queen who is being managed by people who are also negotiating her removal.

The Act of Uniformity sequence is the purest example and it is a parliamentary vote. She needs a majority, does not have one, arranges for two bishops to be detained so they cannot attend, and wins by three, and the film treats the arithmetic of a three-vote margin as the climax of its entire first half.

That approach is why the film works and it is 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.

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.

The early scenes are a young woman who is 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 is young, is enjoying herself, is openly in love in front of a court that is watching, and the film places it early so the last act has something to remove.

The turn is placed precisely. 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 is 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 is a thing they hold.

The final sequence is the removal. Hair cut, face whitened, voice flattened, and a statement that she is 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 is on her side beyond a calculation he does not explain.

Rush plays him quietly and without menace, which is the correct choice. The character is frightening because he is 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, which is 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. Intercut, largely silent, scored with a Requiem, and the audience works out what has been arranged retrospectively while watching it happen.

Kapur was an Indian director with no Tudor background making his first English-language film, which is 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.

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 specific point where compression becomes invention instead of abbreviation.

Some of that is defensible. A two-hour film cannot cover forty-five years, and the invention of a single decisive night is a legitimate dramatic solution to a slow political process.

What is less defensible is the personal material. Elizabeth’s relationship with Dudley is given a betrayal the record does not support, and the film uses it to motivate a decision she made for reasons that were entirely institutional.

That is the standard failure of the form and it is worth naming. A historical figure makes an institutional decision, the film cannot 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, which is the clearest evidence that a voting body will reward a performance for a role it has already recognized once regardless of the film it now sits inside.

The comparison is the one this page makes and it is reasonably clear. 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.

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, which 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 is the profile of a picture that was admired technically and was competing against a better-resourced campaign in every category it entered.

Should you watch Elizabeth?

Yes, and treat it as a political thriller instead of a costume picture. A coronation staged as a hostile takeover, council scenes about vote counts and revenue, a purge resolved entirely through doors opening, and a performance that builds a young woman and then deliberately deletes her.

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