The rapid rise and fall of Mary Stuart has been filmed a number of times before, so director Josie Rourke needs a damn good reason to stick our noses in the tragedy once again. Her revisionist take, turning the rivalry between Mary (Saoirse Ronan), who, when her husband, the king of France, dies, returns to reclaim her throne in Scotland at the age of 18, and her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie), into a cautionary feminist tale about two strong-willed women struggling to navigate a world of men who don’t trust them, is interesting up to a point, but it still has to contend with certain inalienable facts that have to be explained if anything is to make any sense, and, as a result, Mary Queen of Scots comes across as schematic and dramatically anemic.
Rourke’s boldest move is to create a tone of mutual respect between the two monarchs that wasn’t necessarily in evidence in the history books. Being a Catholic, Mary creates twice the anxiety among the Protestant clergy in Scotland and England—which, due to her birthright, she could end up reigning over one day—and John Knox, the head of the Church of Scotland, brands her not only a papist but a harlot, thus taking advantage of her supposedly tainted womanhood to shore up his own power among his flock. Elizabeth isn’t given much of the benefit of the doubt when she schemes to send her own lover (Joe Alwyn) to Scotland to marry the queen in order to ensure that a Protestant is in the court. Mary, of course, rebuffs the entreaty and doubles down on her demand to be named heir to the English throne. Though enmities are enflamed, most of them are fueled by frustration that it is their respective womanhood that is being insulted by the men who advise them. In the end, Rourke stages a secret meeting between the two queens that, apparently, never happened, and she fails to make it worth the wait.
The movie stays true to its title by mostly taking Mary’s side. Elizabeth doesn’t have that many scenes to her herself, and her main troubles seem to be her complexion, which has been ruined by a near fatal dose of pox. Here again, Rourke brings up an interesting if marginal aspect of the Elizabeth legend and does really nothing with it except highlight how looks are still the measure of a woman, even when she’s an absolute ruler. There’s also a kind of hipster cast to the whole production design, from the bushiness of the beards (which make all the males look so much alike I had trouble telling one from another) to the somewhat cynical flow of the dialogue. “Your gifts are your downfall,” says Elizabeth to Mary when they finally meet, a prescient but meaningless observation. It’s as if Elizabeth had seen all the other Mary Queen of Scots movies.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter (050-6868-5001), Bunkamura Le Cinema (03-3477-9264).
Mary Queen of Scots home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2018 Focus Features LLC
It’s interesting that Jodie Foster is thinking about doing a Hollywood remake of this extraordinary Icelandic fantasy, because it seems so resistant to the kind of pat familiarities that Hollywood trades in these days. The hook is understandably appealing: Unassuming single middle-aged woman looking for purpose in her life becomes an underground eco-terrorist who garners headlines and stirs controversy aboveground. And while director Benedikt Erlingsson handles the action portions of the tale with flair and humor, he’s more interested in the philosophical ramifications of our hero’s quest. Altruism is many-sided and complicated to a fault. Sometimes you have to give up one good thing in order to get another.
As we prepare ourselves for another spring-summer of superhero schlock, it’s best not to make too much of a distinction between Marvel and DC. Obviously, the former trumps the latter in most departments, but the late Stan Lee’s runaway train of pop culture signifiers has become so obsessed with outdoing itself movie after movie that the effort becomes a slog for everyone involved, including the viewer. The Spider-Man franchise has always managed to set itself slightly apart from the crowd, and I have no idea if it’s because the brand is handled by Sony rather than Disney, but reportedly the makers of this ambitious animated take on the series had problems selling the studio on their concept, and it’s easy to see why: It’s a genuine kids’ movie, but for kids who are brainier than your average superhero fan, since it deals with multiple dimensions that incorporate parallel plots requiring the viewer to process characters on-the-go. Eventually it was greenlighted, and Sony/Marvel got more than they expected: a huge box office hit and the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
For reasons that are easier to understand than explain, Clint Eastwood is probably considered the most important American director by the Japanese film cognoscenti. Even his minor works, the ones that obviously play to the rafters, get listed on annual top ten lists as a matter of course. The Mule will certainly be no exception, despite the fact that its ambiguous take on the War On Drugs clashes starkly with the Japanese attitude toward illicit drugs in general. That’s not necessarily a demerit when it comes to cinematic depictions, but locals might take away conclusions that weren’t intended.
A lot of critics are calling this road movie about a black musician touring the South in 1962 with a white driver the most embarrassing Best Picture Oscar winner since Crash. Such critics take the Academy Awards too seriously, and for what it’s worth, Green Book has a certain savvy charm that has nothing to do with its racial friendship theme. If anything, Mahershala Ali’s gay, classically trained pianist and Viggo Mortensen’s almost-made-guy club bouncer start out as cartoons and mostly remain that way, even as they both warm to each other’s pecadillos over the course of their journey. It’s not likely that anyone will take it at face value, though, it’s supposed to be based on a true story.
Based on Marguerite Duras’s 1985 novel, La douleur, Emmanuel Finkiel’s film removes the fictive conceit and presents the story as a fairly straightforward memoir of Duras’s experience in occupied Paris during World War II. It’s easy to understand why Duras boosted the book as a novel and not a memoir: removed from their circumstance by forty years, her memories of that time had been clouded by doubts and second thoughts brought on by trauma and repression, especially given the dramatic impetus of the so-called plot. Duras kept diaries, but since she claimed she had no recollection of actually writing things down their context is virtually meaningless except as exegesis.
Reportedly, Barry Jenkins wanted to do an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel before he directed Moonlight, and the consensus seems to be that the only reason he got a green light to tackle Baldwin’s tricky story of tender love in the jaws of gross injustice was his previous movie’s Best Picture Oscar. By most measures, If Beale Street Could Talk is the superior film, though it likely won’t gain the same amount of attention; which isn’t to say both films are significantly different in terms of style and mood. Jenkins might be too tasteful, in fact, but then so was Baldwin despite the undercurrents of anger that course through his writing. There are moments of such incandescent beauty in Jenkins’ film that you almost can’t believe it’s about a man being railroaded for the crime of rape.
The recent death of Albert Finney revived interest in the movie that first made him a star in the U.S. (he was already a sensation in the U.K. thanks to Karel Reisz). Tom Jones attempted to obliterate the stuffy British costume drama with its focus on the low stakes bawdiness that was prevalent in 18th century literature but theretofore ignored by the movies. Whatever its worth as art, it paved the way for a more nuanced, naturalistic take on the historical record. The Favourite is a natural outcome of that legacy, and in the hands of provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos it goes beyond earthy effrontery. Like Lanthimos’s other works, it is sublimely ridiculous, and thanks to a witty script (not written by Lanthimos, but rather by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara) that ridiculousness for once has a firm narrative footing.
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