Tag Archives: Film review

Arts, Films, History

Film Review: The Favourite (15)

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.

★★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Widows (15 cert, 128 minutes)

REVIEW

FOLLOWING Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s reputation as a film artist is carved in stone – untouchable, monumental and hard-hitting. Without pedalling backwards in the slightest, Widows takes him in a whole new direction. It proves there’s another side to McQueen who’s always been bursting to get out – the same one whose industry secret is that he’s always itched to make a James Bond type movie, and now very possibly has.

The tense and clenched opening of Hunger has a prison officer checking under his motor vehicle for concealed bombs. In Widows, one goes off within the first 10 minutes, flinging an exploding armoured van towards the camera. Dramatic fragments, blasted towards the viewer, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a conundrum in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, the movie gets by on no more than electric confidence, technical virtuosity, and a screen cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

With some surprise, and of all sources, McQueen and his co-writer, Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, have turned to a classic of ITV drama from 1983, the 12-part series of the same name created by Lynda La Plante, about the aftermath of a botched armed robbery. The setting has shifted to present-day Chicago, but the structure and theme broadly remains. As before, three widows are left shell-shocked in the rubble – Veronica (Viola Davis), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), none of them previously well-known to each other or at all involved in their husbands’ criminal dealings.

Financially shafted, and in Veronica’s case threatened with violence by an unscrupulous local politician (Brian Tyree Henry), they join forces to pay him and each other off, following blueprints for a planned heist that Veronica’s husband (Liam Neeson) mysteriously bequeathed to her in a safe-deposit box.

This – along with two major sub-plots – is juggled hypnotically, with pacing and precision. If it sounds as though Davis has been at all left out in these manoeuvres, she hasn’t: her character, more screwed over than anyone, is not just prime victim but prime mover, an aggrieved mastermind with a white terrier called Olivia (who tips her off to at least one severe shock) rarely far from her bosom. As she goes along, her performance stealthily dominates, without preventing anyone else in the ensemble from seizing their moments to shine.

Rodriguez, debatably, brings less novelty or shading to her role but Debicki – at one point convincingly posing as a Polish mail-order bride – is tremendous.

The real star, though, is McQueen himself. His steely grasp of stakes, pace and setting never falters: the ringleader of his own trusty crew, he has the dream team of editor Joe Walker, cinematographer Sean Bobbit and composer Hans Zimmer to do his very precise bidding. Few but McQueen would have the nerve to shoot a long dialogue scene in one take from outside the moving car where it’s happening, to remind us pointedly of the minor character who’s driving, and to take note of the few blocks separating the projects from the gentrified district up the street – all to illustrate and ironise the subject of the conversation. Not that it’s a race, but his clever showmanship leaves the likes of The Departed panting in the rear-view mirror.

Widows was previously shown at the London Film Festival earlier this month and becomes available on general release in November.

Verdict: A super-charged crime epic with Steve McQueen in full-throttle mode. An explosive remake of the 1983 TV series Widows created by Lynda La Plante.

★★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: The Wife (15 cert) 100 min

REVIEW

GLENN Close is the living actress who has most often been beaten to an Oscar: six times since 1982, the words “but no cigar” have been ringing in her ears. With The Wife, she has her best shot since Dangerous Liaisons (1989) of laying this curse to rest. The tantalising irony of the film is that it’s actually about an awards presentation – the Nobel Prize in literature, no less – and that her character is not the one receiving it. She’s the one sitting, in a manner Close presumably knows all too well, neglected and on the sidelines.

She is cast as Joan Castleman, destined forever to remain a mere adjunct to Joe (Jonathan Pryce), one of those Great American Novelists in the Roth/Updike mould. The pair have been married for most of a lifetime, ever since Joan’s college days, when Joe, her energetic professor, squirmed out of a loveless first marriage to pursue her. Their life together has involved a kind of crooked deal, where he gets all the credit for literary brilliance, and she uncomplainingly tags along. She turns a blind eye to his frequent affairs and often questions what exactly is in it for her.

Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel was narrated by Joan, and on its very first page, as Joe took fancy to an air stewardess on their flight, she began savagely outlining to the reader all the reasons why she planned to leave him. Adroitly adapted by Jane Anderson and directed by Swedish veteran Bjӧrn Runge, the film eases itself into her predicament more stealthily, laying down the basis for all her buried grievances. It lets Close come in wearing a kind of kabuki mask, a civilised if lightly sardonic front concealing who knows what dissatisfaction and anger lies beneath.

The glittering, frozen quality of her performance is as mesmeric as it is mysterious. The camera lingers on her often as she’s absorbing various slights: when Joe introduces her to peers at a pre-prizegiving social event, announcing “my wife doesn’t write”, her expression barely flickers, but the thermometer somehow drops a thousand degrees. When she watches him flirt with a photographer, you imagine daggers flying out of her eyes.

Veiled hints about the true nature of their marriage are gradually dropped by the script. A hack biographer played by Christian Slater, thwarted in his attempts to gain authorised access, pesters Joan into a private drink, hoping to prise those secrets out of her. But her ability to remain a smiling clam, who can toy with succulent revelations and even flirt with Slater without giving anything concrete away, should never be underestimated.

The Castlemans have a daughter, who has not followed them to Stockholm, and a son (Max Irons) who has, a would-be writer bitterly struggling to escape his father’s shadow. In the book he was a disturbed, occasionally violent computer nerd – a recluse – which felt like a less clichéd conception, but it has presumably been decided that the film needs someone on screen, besides Slater, who notices what doesn’t quite add up about Joe’s literary credentials: his ability, say, to forget the name of a major character from one of his novels.

Pryce’s bluff, garrulous performance suggests a born blagger, as well as an overgrown toddler whose ego needs constant spoon-feeding, whether from Joan, Nobel Prize committees, or the young woman he has managed to ensnare with his spuriously earned fame. The role fits Pryce like an expensive silk glove.

Still, the real point of The Wife is the interior journey it offers to Close, like a red carpet smoothly unfurling towards the kind of Oscar-clip-showcase scenes that genuinely warrant the airplay. She unleashes an explosion in a limousine that feels like 40 years of neglect and disappointment fizzing free from a test tube. But still that glacial repose is hers to resume, if Joan feels like it, choosing to become the sole custodian of her own private legacy.

Close could feasibly miss the Oscar, but watching her lose again – for this, of all roles – will be a thespian psychodrama for the ages.

Verdict: Glenn Close is on stupendous form. A mesmerising performance.

★★★★

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