REVIEW

THE FAVOURITE, set in the corrupt and debauched court of England’s Queen Anne during the 18th century, played magnificently by Olivia Colman, is an absolute hoot. The War of the Spanish Succession is also raging on the Continent.

Colman will soon be appearing as Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The Crown, but it’s safe to say that this regal outing doesn’t give us much of a preview in what’s to come.

Her Anne character here bears more resemblance to another Elizabeth: Miranda Richardson’s Queenie in the TV sitcom Blackadder. She is childlike, prone to taking tantrums, full of self-pity, and in need of constant nursing at the hands of her lifelong but infinitely more glamorous and capable friend, Sarah Churchill, acting the part of the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz).

At the start of the film, Anne shows Sarah a model of the fabulous palace she is gifting her and her husband, the Duke (Mark Gatiss), to mark the famous victory at the Battle of Blenheim. But as Sarah points out, that victory didn’t actually end the war:

“Oh, I did not know that,” replies the Queen, who is not only dim, but also crippled with gout, overweight and given to eating until she makes herself sick. Her courtiers might flatter her absurdly, but the camera says something quite different. Colman, hobbling along the corridors of her palace, gives an uproarious and decidedly un-vain performance. The palace itself is Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.

Weisz similarly delivers an excellent performance. She plays Sarah which at times is almost like the thigh-slapping principal boy in a panto. Both are matched by an ambitious and conniving servant, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), who inveigles her way first into Sarah’s affections, then into the Queen’s.

Hill has an impeccable English accent, connected to her lineage from an aristocratic family. Indeed, her father was Sarah’s cousin; yet, he was also irredeemably feckless.

“When I was 15 my father lost me in a card game,” says Abigail, so matter-of-factly. Sarah condescendingly tosses her a job as a kitchen maid. However, Abigail has not arrived at court to scrub floors and wash dishes. When she uses her foraging skills to make a herbal treatment for the Queen’s gout, she begins her inexorable rise in the court hierarchy.

She then discovers that there is a very secret dimension to the relationship between Sarah and the Queen, who even have pet names, Mrs Freeman and Mrs Morley, for each other.

How can she use this knowledge to her advantage? By this stage it should have occurred to the audience that the film’s title might not refer to Weisz’s calculating Duchess, but to Stone’s social-climbing servant.

Despite this Sarah will still take some supplanting as the power behind the throne. She is politically astute, a vital ally to the Prime Minister (James Smith), as he seeks to raise taxes to subsidise the war effort, which is being led in the field by her heroic husband. Her sworn enemy is the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), who hopes to outflank Sarah by recruiting Abigail as a spy.

Handily, his protégé Colonel Masham (Joe Alwyn) fancies Abigail rotten. “Have you come to seduce me or rape me?” she asks, as he slips into her room one night. With an indignant reply, Masham replies: “I am a gentleman.”

“So, rape then,” she mutters. Repeatedly, the women in this film get the better of the men. All the bawdiness – and the language gets extremely salty at times – would be entertaining enough, but it is given a raucous spin by director Yorgos Lanthimos, working from a very comical and original screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara.

In one marvellous scene, he has a ball – quite literally with the baroque fashions of the time – with all those teetering wigs, powdered cheeks and fake beauty spots. The Greek director can hardly be accused of making ordinary films. His last two screen pictures, 2015s The Lobster (which again featured both Weisz and Colman) and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer in 2017, lurched between the whimsical and the downright weird.

The Favourite contains plenty of whimsy, too. But, without doubt, it is comfortably his best yet; Lanthimos has a director’s eye for the grotesque that suits overt comedy even better than it does for quirky horror. He is aided here by a droll chamber-music score, and by Robbie Ryan’s clever artistry and cinematography – which, sometimes, makes use of a wide-angle lens to wreak further distortion on the film’s twisted characters. The framework of the story, though, is entirely factual. Abigail Masham, as she later became, really did topple Sarah Churchill as the Queen’s favourite, if not perhaps as ruthlessly as she does here. But with hilarious audacity, Lanthimos along with his fellow screenwriters also sprinkle the story with anachronisms, including a dance that is more Saturday Night Fever than House of Stuart, and all sorts of modern-day idioms.

There is also great poignancy beneath all the fun. Abigail finds a way to Anne’s heart partly by playing with the 17 rabbits the Queen keeps in her bedchamber as substitutes for the 17 children she has lost. A later act of callous cruelty reminds us, however, that Abigail does not have her sovereign’s best interests at heart. In fact, she barely has a heart at all.

The Duchess, for all her machinations, genuinely does. This is a film which, at its own heart, is about friendship – both real and faked. A superb film that comes with the highest recommendation.

Verdict: A regal treat of historical fact.

★★★★★