Elizabeth: The Golden Age

EvilDirector's Cynical Review of Elizabeth: The Golden Age

**1/2 out of ****

"I have a hurricane in me that will strip Spain bare if you dare to try me."

As a history teacher, I'm a sucker for historical films. If I see a trailer featuring characters in exquisite period costumes, armies clashing in clouds of powder smoke, or great princes giving rousing speeches of glory and honor, I'm hooked. My ass will be in a theatre seat come that film's release date. I was in such a seat when I first saw an unfamiliar actress, the beautiful Cate Blanchett, play England's greatest queen in 1998's Elizabeth. That Oscar-nominated film snuck up on viewers and gave us another reason to go the cinemas in one of our best years for historical pieces, with Shakespeare in Love, Saving Private Ryan, and The Thin Red Line all emerging to compete for a historian's affections. Now, nearly a decade later, Blanchett and director Shekhar Kapur have reunited to give us The Golden Age.

Despite the wise goverance of England's Virgin Queen, the tiny island nation is weak and beset by enemies. From across the seas, devout Catholic Phillip II of Spain is determined to unleash the forces of the Inquisition on Protestant England, and has begun construction of a Great Armada to bring the fires to the British shore. Catholic rebels plot to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary, Queen of Scots, on her throne. It is a pivotal point in the history of the world, a lesson every school child should remember from classes otherwise long forgotten: the ascendency of one empire and the fall of another. Into this time of turmoil, explorerer and pirate Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) pursues the lonely Elizabeth (and her handmaiden), while Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) tries to unravel the pieces of the conspiracy that surround the Virgin Queen.

The first film provided high drama and beautiful camera work in abundunce; this second entry well emulates the latter, but is less successful with the former. The performances are sound and, sometimes, downright amazing, the settings are grandiose, the colors vivid, and the camera work glorious in revealing the scope of Elizabethan England...but the story fails to capture the tense sense of danger that the first film portrayed so well. This is possibly because the early years of Elizabeth's reign are far less known that events portrayed in The Golden Age, which have been seen over and over in Hollywood history. The story does it's part as well, serving to make Elizabeth seem like a spoiled and weak brat rather than the strong Queen we saw at the end of the first film; honestly, some of the film's romantic maudlings began to verge on the sophomoric. In trying to repeat the romantic entanglements of Elizabeth, Kapur has forgotten that we have moved a decade past the events of the Queen's younger life. He paints tragedy and triumph on an epic scale, and, in the midst of such earth-changing events, he shoehorns in such a silly sub-plot that we almost wonder why Elizabeth is known as a great monarch, if she could be so monumentally moved by such high-school level hormonal tripe.

Walter Raleigh was seemingly added to the film for two reasons: to provide the aforementioned romance, and to allow us to experience the Armada battle on a personal level, through the pirate's eyes (and to allow us a little action release at the climax). While Clive Owen steals almost every scene he is in, I found myself wishing his character had either been cut or had been written into the story a lot better. There was even a way to include a romance WITHOUT resorting the tepid juvenile love triangle with the handmaiden: bring back Joseph Fiennes character of Lord Robert Dudley from the original film, who, historically, was still a favorite at the time of The Golden Age and who played an important role during the Invasion. Seeing Raleigh and Dudley compete for the Queen's respect would have been a lot more subtle and a lot more dignified than seeing the greatest monarch England has known competing with a buxom teen for the love of a pirate. Nevertheless, Owen does do his best with the character, and his best is often spell-binding (like, for instance, the scene where he describes sailing to the new world).

Kapur has also apparently forgotten the nature of Sir Francis Walsingham from the first film: Dangerous, sly, mysterious, almost a force of nature in his cunning and Machiavellian sense of duty, Rush's portrayal ten years ago was mesmerizing. The Walsingham who appears in The Golden Age is not the same man; Kapur, with seemingly no need for the realist and hard spy-master from the original, instead wrote Walsingham into a weak and dying counselor who does nothing but echo threats of impending doom and encourage the Queen to marry. The Walsingham ten years ago was more historically accurate: a tall, upright shape in the shadows, ruthlessly loyal to his monarch.

In the end, The Golden Age is a nice way to spend an afternoon, especially if history interests you; for others, however, The Golden Age is better left on the shelf. Pick up the original Elizabeth, and, if you find yourself still interested, then puruse this interesting, but lesser, sequal.

****- Perfect in Execution, Riveting, and Bound to Be A Classic

*** 1/2- Nearly Perfect, Riveting

***- Flawed in Some Manner, But Overall well Made, Entertaining

** 1/2- Flawed, Entertaining on a Guilty-Pleasure Level

**- More Flawed Then Not, Only Occasionally Entertaining

* - Completely Flawed, Never Entertaining