The Favourite, Mary Queen of Scots

Three Christmas Queens, Also Who Is Joe Alwyn?

Originally printed in Compass, DECEMBER 19, 2018.

While Netflix and Hallmark may be churning out a trove of family-safe, royal–themed holiday movies ad nauseum, there are only two films in theaters this Christmastime whose very plots change course based on some well–skilled lip service performed on two queens. Unwrap that gift for a moment. Unfortunately, attention to feminine pleasure aside, the two could not be more different. One film is electrically rude, riding high on its own cruel humor. The other is a total slog.

 The year is 1587 and Mary Stuart (Saoirse Ronan, “Lady Bird”) is being led to her execution by order of her cousin, Elizabeth I, Queen of England (Margot Robbie, “I, Tonya”). It’s a hushed, serene costume drama scene, but students of the Elizabethan age know the real–life Mary’s beheading was surely the oddest, least dignified public death a monarch has ever endured. After the axe’s third swing that finally severed the neck of the Scottish Queen, the executioner grabbed her head to wave in victory only to find himself clutching a red wig while Mary’s head rolled, scalp exposed as nothing but short gray wisps. Then her little dog scampered out from under her corpse’s dress. None of this happens in the film “Mary Queen of Scots.” It’s much more conventional than the truth.

British theater veteran and first–time film director Josie Rourke seems keen to depict the 16th century figures as grand symbols for any age  — two women whose clear–eyed ambitions were twisted and undone by the manipulations of men. Instead of a fight for the church, it becomes a contemporary matter of split feminine principle. Mary is a liberated champion of the people. Elizabeth is a closed-off careerist for herself. 

Taking place primarily as 18-year-old Mary returns to Scotland in 1561 after the death of her first husband, the sickly King of France, the film pushes her claim to the English throne as that of an unwavering female voice ushering in a modern-day resistance. Depicted as ahead of her time in every way, she humiliates Scotland’s Protestant leader after he berates her gender, advocates for religious tolerance, has some premarital fun with her second husband, the caddish drunk Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden, “Dunkirk”), and barely bats an eye when he beds her male courtier on their wedding night. In a scene that would be hard to imagine taking place so amicably even between two art students at Bard, Mary concedes to her friend, “We were both taken in by Darnley’s charms.” 

The film’s bits of sexual fiction (Or was it fact? Who cares?) is mostly to divert attention from the fact that “Mary, Queen of Scots” can’t get it up for its main source of conflict: Catholicism. That the film sleeps through explaining The Succession Act its story depends on, but sizzles to life during the unnecessarily violent onscreen murders of both Darnley and his one–time male paramour muddies whatever pretense of progressive politics it ever held. 

Equally telling is that the film can only muster passion for Elizabeth during her bouts of humiliation.  Here she is a pox-ridden spinster, placated by her loyal favorite, Lord Robert Dudley (Joe Alwyn, last seen like, last week, in “Boy Erased”), while the film neglects what turned their unconsummated love into history worth remembering.

Alwyn, mostly made up of flopping blond hair and doleful eyes, seems to have stepped out of the legendary Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and decided at age 27, “Why not appear in a bunch of potential Oscar-nominated dramas?”  And so he has. The muse for Taylor Swift’s latest series of pop-sonnets (one is just called “Gorgeous”), he appears again as an English courtier, two centuries later and to far better use, in Greek director’s Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite.” 

Will you enjoy this film? Let this be your litmus test. Alwyn, adorned in a giant periwig and cheeks covered in handfuls of rouge, bursts into Emma Stone’s bedroom one night. “Have you come to seduce or to rape me?” she asks flatly. “I am a gentleman.” “So rape, then,” she concludes.

Lanthimos likely earned as many film critic fans as uncomfortable audience members with the bitter absurdism of his English-language debut, “The Lobster,” but “The Favourite” is pure art-house confection. Consider it the film equivalent of rum–spiked eggnog — a fattening treat just for the grown–ups.

There is no rape, of course. On the elegant stage on which the film’s madhouse story takes place, the violence is all tongue work. Insults and turns of phrases that you’ve never heard before, none of which I could begin to print, dart and jab from the mouths of sparring conversationalists like Shakespeare by way of the graffiti on a middle school bathroom stall. The best come from Nicholas Hoult, who, after a stint trying as an American star, has returned to his bitchy British accent as a Whig who can still effectively snigger under a pound of make-up and strokes his walking stick like a phallus in the middle of Parliament. 

Hoults and Alwyns aside, the film belongs wholly to a trio of equally matched actresses — Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz as Anne’s lady–in–waiting and lover, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and Emma Stone as Abigail Hill, Sarah’s down–on–her–luck cousin. 

Released from the bonds of being a respectful period piece, Lanthimos’ film still better understands that our fascination with characters living in the past isn’t the way fiction can bend them to our current way of thinking, but the inflexibility of their societal situations, and the stories that leap forth from stakes that cannot be replicated in modernity.

It is both a more beautiful, and more truthfully ugly film than “Mary, Queen of Scots.” There is the “Barry Lyndon” styled natural light, the candelabra’s orange glow and the floor-to-ceiling windows that radiate white, the courtly uniform of luxuriously quilted navy dresses, and the Queen’s bedchamber, walls lined with a collage of interwoven wool tapestries like Ralph Lauren meets The Cloisters — but it all starts with Abigail arriving at the palace covered in human feces.

She has come to escape a future of homelessness and prostitution. Temporarily secured even as the lowest-rung, readily maltreated scullery maid, she quickly sets her sights on her only potential path to safety — Anne’s affection. Coleman plays the Queen as a pitifully demented creature, plagued by just about everything that can plague a person — gout, sadness, irritable bowel syndrome. Her body is failing her and her emotions are out of control. Her mind is long gone, and in its place is Sarah, sharp and watchful as a hawk, who can be all things, political advisor, nursemaid, playmate and bedfellow. Sarah is shrewd but sincere, Anne is guileless, petty, but sincere, and Abigail, as a girl fallen so below the station to which she was bred, well, she would have told Mary Stuart not to concede to those who find themselves between the wrong sheets. That’s no way for a lady to get ahead.