Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Let me just ask right up front: what is going on with Elizabeth’s hair? I get that it’s a wig, but then, when she’s reviewing the troops and it’s down on her shoulders, all lank, it looks like her real hair — and if she’s in warrior mode, why wouldn’t she appear to the knights with it shorn, like Joan of Arc? (And either way, braid that shit up, girl; it’s going to snag on your armplates.) But then we get another scene later when she’s on the cliff, watching the armada burn, and it’s cropped again, like we saw it in the bath earlier…but then we’d just seen her in the tent, suited up in armor, with it long. Dream sequence? Did I miss something?
Not to obsess over costuming bagatelles, but a movie like this one — not very good, really, but enjoyable to watch if it’s done right — can’t afford to leave visual hangnails like that one unclipped. I did enjoy the movie, although the script is period boilerplate, and Clive Owen gives a lazy performance; the unfortunate result is a smarm that doesn’t play as intentional. But Cate Blanchett is obviously the engine driving this train, and what a powerful engine. She’s just wonderful, especially in the cringier scenes where the character is 1) delivering the gas-of-a-rotting-plum dialogue too often occasioned by attempts to imagine historical events; and/or 2) exposed as emotionally unsophisticated despite her position, but no matter how awkward the situation or the lines, Blanchett co-opts them in order to make Elizabeth a woman you might know, or would want to know.
It’s all the more impressive because I don’t really connect with Blanchett, usually; I thought she did great work in Notes On A Scandal, but that character is a not-real-sympathetic mess, and on balance I’d found her a little hard to plug into. That’s not the case here, and it’s a pity she won’t win Best Actress for this (like it or not, and I’m not sure I do, it’s between Christie and Cotillard this year).
Tags: movies
I haven’t had a chance to see this movie yet…I’m not a big theater-goer, and I’ve been waiting for it to come out on DVD so we can pop it on our NetFlix list.
Anyway, I’m a big English history freako. When I read these days, it’s usually a fictional autobiography…started the trend with a book about Anne Boleyn, written as though it was by Anne and which gave a startlingly different image of the woman behind the former-queen that I had come to know throughout my studies. Then I moved on to a book titled “I, Elizabeth” which I would highly recommend to anyone who thought they knew who Elizabeth I was.
THAT is what I think The Golden Age was based loosely on, and is the reason I’m so excited to see the film. The book portrayed her much in the same light the film appears to. Should be interesting to see how it all plays out. (Might not have been Clive Owen’s performance that was so flat as it was the character he had to play. Sir Walter Raleigh doesn’t come out so well in the book I read, either. I just wanted him to go ‘way much of the time I was reading it.)
Well, I actually enjoyed this film; and I also enjoyed Blanchett as Elizabeth, but I think her first attempt at this role worked so, so much better. This time, her work was a lot less impressive, but still very enjoyable.
But, I think Christie is quite deserving of another Oscar. Or even Cotillard. I just hope it doesn’t go to Page.
Thanks for the review – I couldn’t tell from the general hype whether it would turn out to be dull-but-pretty or unwatchably bad. I agree with you on the long, flowing hair over armour look – not overly practical. She looks like she’s posing for the cover of Heavy Metal. (Well, except she’d need her boobs out.)
My mother’s an Elizabeth I/Tudors in general nut, and had rude things to say about historical accuracy in the first things and even worse things to say about this one, although she thought the characterisation of Elizabeth herself probably wasn’t too bad. I thought the first film was fantastic myself, and will never understand why bloody Gwenyth got the Oscar. It’s not that she was bad in Shakespeare In Love, it’s that she just wasn’t as good as Blanchett.
I forgave this movie a whole slew of its faults because of the inclusion of that great-beyond-counting map-on-a-rug. I covet that soooo badly. “I stomp on you, Spain!”
Biggest travesty of the last 10 years is Gwyneth winning the Oscar over Cate. I have seen both performances several times since then, and Cate’s is the one that stands out. It’s just the better of the two.
That being said, it is a shame she won’t win this year, if the reviews of “The Golden Age” are to be believed. I think the nomination itself is to recognize that the Academy screwed her over the first time she played Elizabeth I.
Cate is the best thing in the movie, by far, she owns the role and that helped make up for a lot of the film’s shortcomings.
A lot of little nitpicky things bothered me – Cate is about 15 years too young to be playing Elizabeth at that point in her life, and Mary Queen of Scots’s Scottish accent really bugged me, since she was raised in France. Samantha Morton was also too young for the role.
The wig with the long flowy hair when she adressed the soldiers is historically accurate, I believe. I think they kept showing her cropped hair to really drive home the point that her elaborate hairdos were wigs. But yeah, it was a bit ham-fisted.
I watched this on a plane coming back from a business trip to Spain, and I have to admit I did not hate it. The one thing I’ll remember about watching it. Virtually everyone else on the flight was Spanish, and were busy drinking the plane dry during most of the film–but during the climactic “defeat of the Spanish Armada” scene, the passengers did seem to hush a little and watch it. There was an audible gasp when the white horse jumped off the ship…
Coleen, oh big word, wordy mcwordster on the horror and shame that was Fishsticks winning over my girl Cate. EVERY damn time I see Paltrow’s performance I am sickened again that she won over Blanchett. (Nothing against that movie, though. It was cute and I liked everyone else.)
It’s been talked to death so I guess I’ll let it go; however, Elizabeth: The Golden Age? I rather enjoyed but really it was because of Cate. It didn’t rock my world like the first one but to see her inhabit that role again was well worth the price of admission.
I loved this movie, but I’m a sucker for costume dramas. No, it probably wasn’t the best acted, written, directed, etc., but the dresses! The gowns! The robes!! Plus I would watch Clive Owen read the phone book for 2 hours. He came off pretty sleazy in the movie, but my god, eye candy.
Um, I think I just made the case for this movie not being Oscar-caliber (except for costuming!).
Oh….Golden Age….2 hours of my life I’ll never get back! I had such high hopes for this movie! I loved the first Elizabeth movie, I continue to bitch about Blanchett not getting the Oscar for it, I love Clive Owen and he usually doesn’t do wrong….but this…for God’s sake they puch a freakin’ Matrix shot in the end of it!
My apologies for putting this here instead of in the comments under the more appropriate Sicko post, but on the off-chance a few more people will still be reading this review:
If you haven’t, please, please, please see Taxi To The Dark Side. It won’t win with Sicko and No End In Sight in the competition, but it is far and away my favourite of the docs up for the Oscar this year. (Of the ones I’ve seen, that is.) The guy who directed it, Alex Gibney, did the Enron film a couple of years ago and was an exec producer on No End In Sight and is essentially doing for detainee torture what NOEIS did for the war, but the subject is just that much more harrowing and I didn’t come away from it feeling “Yeah, but I knew all that already” which I did after NOEIS.
Erm, the only thing I have to say about Elizabeth is that at the press conference for it Clive Owen was looking smokin’ hot and the camera guys behind me were trying to figure out how to film Cate Blanchett because she was so pale (I guess compared to the tanorexics they’d been filming previously). Heh.
I didn’t find the long wig inconsistent, both because I remembered seeing a portrait of Elizabeth in armor with a wig like this on, and because it didn’t look at all like real hair to me. After watching the movie, I saw an interview with Cate Blanchett in which she specifically mentioned that wig as historically accurate. She also characterized it using a phrase I had never heard before: she said it was Elizabeth’s “mutton dressed as lamb” wig, and for her American viewers, she defined the term as a derogatory way to speak of an older woman who tries to dress younger than her age.
Did she really think Americans in particular wouldn’t have heard that phrase?
Yes, that’s what she said. I am an American and I had never heard the saying before, although I understood immediately what it meant once she said it.
To further try to answer your question about why, “if she’s in warrior mode…she [wouldn’t] appear to the knights with it shorn, like Joan of Arc:” first, I believe that Elizabeth lost much of her hair as a fairly young woman after a bout with smallpox, and wore wigs for the rest of her life to hide this. If she was self-conscious about her hair loss, I doubt that she’d want to flaunt it just at a moment when she needed to appear authoritative and confident.
Second, as to why she wouldn’t want to evoke Joan of Arc, it is my understanding that Joan was (and still is) not just a Catholic hero and martyr, but also a symbol of Catholic defiance against papal enemies. Since Elizabeth’s whole reign represented, to some degree, the solidification of her father’s painful and sometimes-bloody break from the Catholic Church, I could imagine that Elizabeth might be loath to call upon Joan’s image for her own uses, considering what it might remind her subjects of. Also, Joan was a frequent target for vilification by the Church of England and its loyal subjects (see Henry VI, Part 1)
I’m aware of the reasons Elizabeth might not have wanted to evoke Joan of Arc specifically; I’m saying that appearing before her knights shorn the way Joan of Arc was might have presented a more warrior-like aspect. It wouldn’t have been about suggesting Joan, but rather indicating that she, Elizabeth, is not fucking around come the time to fight alongside the men.
My question wasn’t really about the wig historically; I get the virgin-queen long-hair thing, I get the contemporary tonsorial mores, but the issues is that the way it was done *here* pulled me out of the movie, and given that much of the interior drama is about the conflicts between Elizabeth the Queen, Elizabeth the warrior, and Elizabeth the woman who just wants to be loved is that so wrong, it should have been made more explicit, or consistent. The questions of identity, I think, tie into her hair, or could have been tied into her hair, but as it was, it was merely distracting.