MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS

Theatre director Josie Rourke turns to the big screen with a surprisingly good historical drama focussing on the period between Mary Stuart arriving in Scotland in 1561 at the age of 19, and her abdication and flight to England 7 years later at the age of 26. We then get a coda of her execution nearly 20 years later. Accordingly, those looking for a detailed examination of the Babington plot will go unrewarded. This is, I feel, rightly an interrogation of why this woman with such a strong claim to both the thrones of Scotland and England, could neither hold onto one, nor claim the other.  

In answering the question, screenwriter Beau Willimon draws parallels between Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth I of England, Wales and Ireland. He posits a three-fold answer.  First, Elizabeth I transforms herself, politically speaking, into a man.  Rather than making herself vulnerable to a husband's control, she forgoes the joy of motherhood to rule uncontested, and in a manner that her court can accept.  By contrast, Mary is made weak by the ambitions of her husband, his father, and her half-brother.  Second, Elizabeth I is exceedingly lucky in her loyal, skilful and ruthless advisor, Lord Cecil, whereas Mary is ultimately betrayed by her courtiers, not just once but many times.  Finally, the film seemingly argues that Mary's own character was to blame - not least her wilfulness in marrying Darnley, and her arrogance in condescending to Elizabeth I even as she begs for an army to retake her crown. 

As one might expect from the show-runner of HOUSE OF CARDS, the script is a really good and pretty factually accurate depiction of the civil turmoil in Scotland during Mary Stuart's reign. The principal objections to Mary's rule are that she's a woman, and a Catholic.  Her protestant half-brother James' regency is thus preferred by some. Radical cleric John Knox preaches against her alleged infidelity and her allegiance to Rome.  And even those apparently on her side - her Catholic Stuart cousin Henry Stuart, whom she marries, is angry when she won't make him her successor.  Willimon deftly shows Mary manoeuvring and being outmanoeuvred, until finally she has nowhere else to run except England.

I also loved everything about the costumes and make-up in this film - beautifully contrasting the more formal opulence of the English court with the more intimate less gaudy Scottish court.  Make-up is also used with great effect to contrast Mary's insistence that she rules as herself - a strong-minded Catholic woman - and Elizabeth subsuming herself into the image of the Virgin Queen  - a theme also explored to great effect in Shekhar Kapur's superb ELIZABETH.  Max Richter's score is wonderful and I love how Josie Rourke weaves music into the foreground, particularly in the character of Mary's favourite, David. That said, Rourke can't direct a battle scene for toffee.

Historically, of course, the two Queens didn't meet. Or if they did, there's no strong evidence for it. And the director nicely hints at this in the opening moments of their meeting, as they struggle to find each other throughly gauzy sheets, giving the meeting a fantasy quality.  There is some evidence to hint at Darnley's bisexuality, if not that he slept with David. Mary's tolerance for David's cross-dressing seems anachronistic.  And of course Mary probably spoke with a French accent.  But aside from these dramatic inventions, I DO think that the film gets at something more profoundly true about how both of these women approached being Sovereign and why ultimately one prevailed and the other did not.  And that's the greater purpose of cinema, after all. We also get a typically superb performance from Ronan as Mary - but perhaps more surprisingly, a really emotionally powerful, stunning performance from Robbie as Elizabeth - one that really does steal the film.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that I would love to see Robbie portray Elizabeth in a series of films. 

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS is rated R and has a running time of 124 minutes.  The film is on release in the USA and UK.

THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS aka THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS

I love this movie!  Parents with small kids should go see it!  Adults without kids should go see it!  It has wit, charm, intelligence, pirates, the Elephant Man, a dodo, swashbuckling, ham-eating, Brian Blessed, and all in an action-packed, emotionally satisfying 85 minutes.  Honestly,  this is about as good as cinematic entertainment gets!  Kudos to Aardman Studios (home of Wallace and Gromit) for brilliantly mixing hand-made stop-motion animation and CGI backdrops, and achieving a level of visual wit that demands repeated viewings. Kudos to director Peter Lord of Morph fame, for delicately balancing comedy and action.  Kudos to all the voice artists, but particularly Hugh Grant as Pirate Captain - a rare chance to see his comedy chops.  But most of all, kudos to Gideon Defoe, who wrote the screenplay based on his own novels. I really hope Aardman follow the ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS!* with the rest of the series.

In this instalment, we meet Pirate Captain and his dead-pan named crew (Number Two, Albino Pirate, Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate...).  He's a loveable old cove, but pretty hapless and destined to lose the Pirate of the Year award unless he can pull off a massive coup. His chance arrives when he mistakenly holds up Charles Darwin's Beagle, and Darwin (David Tennant) tells him that his beloved parrot, Polly, is in fact a Dodo!  There follows a trip to London to display Polly at the Royal Academy, thereby winning some booty, and an adventure against a sword-wielding Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) who hates, hates, HATES pirates!

There's so much to love here.  The richly decorated backdrops are full of visual jokes.  But in the foreground, I loved the whole Brian Blessed worship.  I loved the idea of Darwin's butler being a trained monkey with comedy flash-cards.  I loved the idea of Queen Victoria as a murdering ninja.  Most of all, I just loved Hugh Grant in his best performance since ABOUT A BOY.

This is hands down my movie of the year to date.

THE PIRATES! is on release in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Kuwait, New Zealand, Serbia and Estonia. It opens on April 12th in Greece; on April 20th in Argentina, Colombia and Romania; on April 27th in the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Canada, India and the USA; on May 11th in Brazil; on May 17th in Hungary; on June 7th in Serbia; on July 20th in Spain; on July 26th in Hong Kong; on August 9th in Israel; and on August 30th in Singapore.

*I'm not sure why the film has been retitled for the US market unless the marketing department think the US has become a crypto-theocracy in which even the mention of science is going to alienate audiences?

London Film Fest Day 14 - GLORIOUS 39

Stephen Poliakoff is a well-respected British play-wright and some-time film director, and the cast of Glorious 39 is filled with great British actors - from the young and talented Romola Garai and Eddie Redmayne, to stars Jeremy Northam, Julie Christie and Bill Nighy. How disappointing, then, to find his new World War Two political thriller to be poorly made, poorly acted, poorly written and patronising to boot.

The story is set in the weeks before England went to war with Germany - the glorious summer of 1939. The adopted daughter (Romola Garai) of a wealthy aristocratic family (Nighy, Agutter, Redmayne, Temple, Christie) discovers that the British government is hiding recordings of meetings in her family's rambling country estate. They give evidence that certain elements within the British establishment are so afraid of another war, and so convinced that they can't win it, that they are preparing to negotiate a secret surrender to Hitler before the war has even begun. (All true, as it happens). The movie is a thriller, wherein the daughter uncovers the who the voices are on the record, and tries to smuggle it out to people who can use it to bring down Chamberlain's government and bring Winston Churchill to power.

All this could've been the stuff of a superb thriller, in the manner of ENIGMA. But this film lacks context. We never see the politicos, the military and the aristos arguing over the future of Britain. The stakes are all rather academic, and explained in a very patronising manner by characters played by David Tennant and Hugh Bonneville. Stephen Poliakoff seems to be assuming that his audience won't know anything about World War Two. What we are left with is a melodrama centred on this rich family who motor around the countryside and attend nice parties. The siblings are vaguely sinister, and there is a spooky looking government man, but no real sense of tension. I spent much of the movie being annoyed at the heroine for taking her time. If you found the 1939 equivalent of the Watergate tapes, wouldn't you just jump in a car and take it straight to the opposition party? Why all the listening, carrying in handbags and re-listening? Why the comedy, Agatha Christie style bumping off of minor characters?

Still, for all that, the movie is vaguely interesting for the first hour. Where it really comes off the rails is in the final hour. The heroine finds out who is plotting against her and is captured. At that point, the performances and writing veer into B-movie melodrama. It's truly risible and basically unwatchable. We then squelch into a final act, where the enemies, so ardent in hunting her down, just let her slip off, and a final scene in which we're meant to acknowledge her as a true hero of the war. But she never actually does anything!

What a waste of talent.

GLORIOUS 39 played Toronto 2009 and opens in the UK on November 20th.