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.
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.
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