Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Historical Spectacle

Queen Elizabeth I's short but powerful speech to her troops at Tilbury was, in many ways, both the highlight of her reign and one of the best political speeches of her era. The most compelling aspect of it is Elizabeth's understanding of her audience and her attempt to treat with them on common ground. In short, she shows them that she cares, that she appreciates their being there on the anticipated battlefield. How much this is genuine sentiment and how much it is merely geared to buck up soldiers facing a numerically superior force we will never know. Regardless, the speech still stands impressively more than four hundred years after the fact. Boldest of all here is the Queen's direct address of the issue of her gender: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too." Elizabeth's task, no mean one, was to convince her soldiers that she, a woman, could lead them as well as--or better than--any man. That she ruled so long and so peacefully--comparatively, given the religious strife that had so torn the country during her lifetime--is a testament to her ability to win over the people.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age seeks to capture something of the woman-monarch's matchless charisma and to recreate the tense drama of this moment at Tilbury, when the emerging British empire is nearly at the mercy of the great Spanish Armada and the ten thousand troops it threatens to bring to England's shores. In addition to the opening address ("My loving people"), the film retains only one line of Elizabeth's speech, closely paraphrased: "I am resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all." Instead of the head-on tackling of gender dynamics and the repeated invocation of God, kingdom, and people--the three domains of the Renaissance world-view--we get references to the sails and guns of the enemy and a Crispin's Day-like promise either of glorious victory or of defeat equally glorious. On paper and in the film, Elizabeth's speech comes off as much more genuine and much less Machiavellian than good King Henry V's, though we must acknowledge that she was certainly not without her Machiavellian qualities. Her speech in the film, however, adds a greater dash of battlefield flavor than the original possessed. It urges the good fight while simultaneously foreshadowing the computer-generated spectacle at sea we are about to witness.

The staging of this speech in the film begins with the right approach--woman warrior in steel cuirass and viking-maiden braids--and then sells out language-wise in favor of boosting the plot dynamics. It's a disappointing moment for Elizabeth I enthusiasts, who might possibly have sat through the preceding hour and a half of film waiting specifically for the delivery of this speech, but obviously we are not the target demographic. Elizabeth really did wear a plate-armor breastplate, but the sails of the Spanish Armada were not likely to have been visible from Tilbury and they certainly did not run aground en masse on the English coast (the fleet was near Ireland when it sustained its heaviest losses). Elizabeth did not look out across the windy surf to see their burning wreckage, as she does in the film. Of course, historical accuracy has been sacrificed here for the sake of narrative momentum, but no matter--dramatists have been rewriting history since the birth of the written line. The problem here is how cheap it all sometimes seems.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is not a bad film, just a disappointing one. We might expect something better than what it has for us. What it does offer is an overview of the major themes of the middle parts of Elizabeth's reign, picking up where the first Cate Blanchett-driven Elizabeth film left off ten years ago, Elizabeth's status as monarch solidly established along with her commitment to the preservation of her own celibacy. Thus we start out firmly embroiled in the personal-political dynamic that informs the age of Elizabeth: in order to maintain power, Elizabeth must rule alone. Whereas male rulers, such as Elizabeth's own father, would literally kill for the opportunity to produce a male heir, Elizabeth seemed to have cared less about all of that. She knew that her legacy would be established solely by her own words and deeds.

The particular revisionist focus of this film involves the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism--or, as writ in this film, the conflict between liberal, enlightened religious tolerance and religious extremism. Clearly, this epic struggle has been played up in the film to resonate with modern viewers. Philip II of Spain represents the dark side of the religious spectrum, declaring essentially a holy war (that very phrase is used) against the English in response to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Little is made of economic or political objectives that may have motivated Spain to wage war against the English. Elizabeth is presented as the prototype of moderation in religion, and it is true that under her the Church of England emphasized adherence to outward shows of ceremony over inward matters of faith. In other words: show up for services on Sundays, but believe what you want to believe. Such a stance was a political expedient in a country in desperate need of reconciliation after decades of faith-based strife, but it also proved to be a key development in the birth of religious toleration. The only Catholics the queen seems to have persecuted were those who were trying to kill her--and fair is fair in that regard. But the tones taken on here in the examination of this conflict seem overly exaggerated without the full political context. That the war between England and Spain was more about religion than it was about empire--this is a hard sell. In The Golden Age, it's the past that gets sold out; the blunt imposition of our modern concerns overrides everything in order to give the viewer a chance to identify with the world of the film.

The primary element, though, at work in this film is personal and dramatic--at times melodramatic--and again it involves a fair degree of historical whitewashing. I am speaking here of the relationship between the queen and Sir Francis Drake. Historically, Drake was a pirate, an explorer, a shameless opportunist; he is frequently identified as an instigator of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, Drake (Clive Owen) is a roguishly handsome pirate with a heart of gold and a keen smile, an explorer, a bit of an opportunist in the Han Solo tradition but ultimately loyal to the queen, and there is no mention of the slave trade, only his interest in the native inhabitants of the Americas. The writers have also grafted elements of Sir Walter Raleigh into his story. His only betrayal is an affair of the heart; unable to love the Virgin Queen, though they do in fact fancy each other more than just a little bit, he makes it with her lady-in-waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish), whom he marries in secret, thus landing himself in prison until the queen goes to him in her hour of need. Of course, he is the only one who can pilot the sixteenth century British version of the Millennium Falcon and lead the underdogs to victory against the evil empire.

All of this is fine, really, and I am mocking things a bit just because it is easy to do so. What makes this grand historical spectacle so hollow at times--what makes it seem cheap--is the wooden dialogue. Drake's lines, in particular, are often groaningly awful. "We mortals have many weaknesses," he wisely advises the queen when she faces a moment of self-doubt; "We feel too much. Hurt too much ... All too soon we die. But we do have the chance of love." Worse still, when Bess comes to visit him aboard his ship:

DRAKE: This is my life, Bess.
BESS: It seems to me a lonely life.
DRAKE: Sometimes. But it's the life I've chosen.

Such lines are chiseled to match the set of the jaw on Clive Owen's face, but they don't well make good script or, for that matter, match the tone of the period. Later, Drake tells Bess when she faces a crisis of loyalties, "We're all humans"--but this kind of understanding of the nature of humanity seems more a product of the golden age of Oprah than of the golden age of Elizabeth. At the very least, it relies on an understanding of what it means to be human that, if Harold Bloom is correct, wasn't invented until Shakespeare started writing in the decade that followed the defeat of the armada.

There are other objections we might raise here. I find it hard to believe that Elizabeth would have so many qualms as she does here about the execution of her cousin Mary (Samantha Morton), especially in an age of so many commonplace executions and the public posting of body parts. The proto-scientific but also Oprah-fied sage advice of Mary's personal wizard, Dr. John Dee (David Threlfall), is a little hard to stomach at times. Only Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), the queen's councillor and spymaster and an early purveyor of a gritty realpolitik, comes out with nary a scratch.

It is a difficult thing to merge history, which demands facticity and realism, with romance, which demands simplicity of perspective, and that is why so many historical novels and films fall flat, especially to contemporary audiences accustomed to a greater degree of realism. The fact of the matter, though, is that any life of Elizabeth I, like any life of the famous and equally inscrutible bard whose works she may have enjoyed later in her life, must by necessity be an imagined one. The lines she herself wrote were too crafted to reveal the inner nature of the woman, and little of real personality escapes the carefully designed (lead-based) facade of white face paint she wore. In this regard, however--in the realm of imagery--Elizabeth: The Golden Age achieves the great triumph that makes it worthwhile for the Elizabeth enthusiast. As Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett in white face is eerie, shocking, sometimes frightening, strangely beautiful but also hideous, like a figure in a wax museum come to life--like something out of a horror film but with all of the terror stripped away, leaving only wonder. The filmmakers do not go out of their way to exploit the parallel between the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mother (how can they when depicting a Protestant society?), but it is there and ready for the taking. When Elizabeth appears, backlit and glowing amidst the gold figures in her chapel, she demands veneration. Later, holding Drake and Bess' infant child, we understand the appeal of this great ruler of men: "I have no master. Childless, I am mother to my people." We have no choice but to follow.

Diane Arbus and the Nudists

Much has been made of Diana Arbus' photographs of the mentally disabled: accusations of exploitation or at least insensitivity on her part. I might argue that her motives in taking the pictures are largely irrelevant--that the pictures stand on their own regardless of the photographer's intent--but I'm too distracted to join the fray. It's all the naked people who have my attention.

As nudes go, they're not much to look at at first. Accustomed to the plasticized and the airbrushed as we are, we might not know what to make of such real bodies. A few of them might be considered attractive, but that seems besides the point. Take a look through the collection in Revelations. The pitifully scrawny, the average, and the obese all have one thing in common: each of the individuals photographed is utterly, completely comfortable in his or her own skin. That's what makes them fascinating to see. If Adam and Eve really did eat the apple, it's news to them.

The bodies I speak of were photographed primarily at nudist colonies, the whole enterprise of which seems to be a recovery of that mythological time before the Fall. After all, it was Adam and Eve's awareness of their own nakedness that betrayed them: "Who told you that you were naked?" My favorite photograph in this series shows a husband and wife in late middle age, resplendent in their shoes, in their cabin at a nudist camp. The man is the perfect picture of scrawniness, with thick-framed spectacles. The woman is sprightly, a little bit of style and sass in her pose. In short, the two look happy.

Of course, Arbus also photographed strippers and transvestites. She chronicled all sorts of people. In a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1963--the same year she shot photos in nudist camps--Arbus expressed the wish to document the "considerable ceremonies of our present." Of the present, she said, "its innumerable habits lie in wait for their meaning"--a statement that seems to suggest that the establishment of meaning is a retrospective act. There is, I suppose, no other way for a photographer to look at it.

Juno: A Father's Reaction

My dad never seemed to have much interest in what I did during my leisure time while I was in high school. Granted, he didn't need to--I was by any standards of classification a geek and a bookworm and by disposition practically incapable of getting into trouble--but he justified his laissez faire attitude by stating that there was only so much trouble his boys could get into. With the girls, though--that was another story.

Chauvanist as this attitude is, there's a truth to it that any feminist--pick your wave--has to admit. Girls can get into a particular kind of trouble that boys can't get into. Of course, both male and female parties need to be involved for this kind of trouble to occur, but the boy has the option of cut-and-run. The girl doesn't.

Enter Juno, with a unique twist on this theme: it's the girl who wants to cut-and-run (in her own particular coming-to-term way) and the boy who, though he might not know what he wants, doesn't want to cut out. The reason it has taken me so long to get around to seeing this film has to do precisely with the subject matter of the film: I, like the male lead in this film, got a girl pregnant. Unlike Michael Sera's sweet-natured and bumbling Paulie, I am older and married (though still bumbling), and the woman I got pregnant was my wife. In fact, I have gotten her pregnant twice, and the product of the first such undertaking is a two-year-old who makes going to see witty and charming films like Juno virtually impossible.

The younger product (who won't be born until June) went with us to the movie and must have absorbed it with interest, albeit indirectly. Based on post-film discussion, I'd say that the film fired off some powerful responses in my wife and that some of this response must have taken the form of hormonal transmission to the little bird inside her belly. It was, for us, a film that was poignant in ways that it could not be for many other viewers.

What struck me about the film wasn't really the kids, who were perfectly endearing and harmless in their own way, but the adults. In particular, the film has three relationships: Juno (Ellen Page, as if you haven't heard) and Paulie, Vanessa and Mark (the adoptive parents, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and Juno's dad Mac and his wife Bren (J.K. Simmons and Allison Jannie). Juno and Paulie are convincing enough on screen but outside the world of the film rather improbable. Real teens aren't as witty as Juno and no one at any age (outside of Wes Anderson films) is capable of the blend of ironic-cool and naivete that Paulie embodies. (Paulie's a geek but cooler than he knows: he's totally retro and he plays guitar.) Despite their departure from the wholly realistic, Juno and Paulie are convincingly developed, which is what we expect out of good characterization. Vanessa and Mark, by contrast, are mostly foils for the younger couple: they're stereotypes of the suburban couple carried to an extreme, not entirely unrealistic but not entirely real, either. Nevertheless, the sting of the satire is there: Mark, the adult, who is supposed to be mature by virtue of his age and station, does the cut-and-run at the prospect of becoming a father; Vanessa, who has Pottery Barned to the max their house in the remote burbs, seems caught up in appearances, but her heart is golden. If the film has a message, it's that someone who wants to be a parent should be a parent, and that someone who doesn't shouldn't be.

The other relationship that sticks for me is not so much Mac and Bren as it is Mac and Juno. Mac's marriage to Bren is a second for Mac; Juno's mother cut-and-ran (thematic parallel observed) years ago. Toward the end of the film, Mac tells Juno (rather like the protagonist of a late Shakespearean play, one where the mother is seemingly nonexistent) that the relationship that will last is his fatherly love for her. This is a bit of a change from his initial response, when he tells Juno that he thought she was the kind of girl who knew when to say when. Mac's kinder words got to me because, like those Shakespeare plays, they say so much about what it means to be a parent. Mac faces the reality of a daughter in a predicament. I face the uncertainty of the very, very young/not-yet-born. I don't know what my kids are going to do. I'm hoping for the best, ready for anything.

A couple of months ago, Caitlin Flanagan, who writes thoughtful and challenging pieces for The Atlantic Monthly about issues affecting teenage girls, called Juno a "fairy tale" in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. I can sum up the fairy tale so: girl meets boy, girl gets pregnant, girl decides to give the child away, girl does so, and girl meets boy again and they go on with their happy, carefree teenage lives. Juno is a fairy tale then in depicting an improbable but ideal outcome that defies statistical fact in the lives of teenage girls, but not so in its depiction of the lives of adults. The fact of the matter is, nothing can prepare you for parenthood except the wish to be a parent, and Juno gets that right.