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Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: October 13, 2007

Look who’s back. It’s Queen Elizabeth the First. And just when you thought the season of Hollywood sequels was over. In this installment of The Royal Franchise, Her Majesty faces an elaborate international conspiracy to dethrone her, or assassinate her, or at least call her a bunch of derogatory names in Spanish. How she foils this vaguely articulated plot with only trite and truncated dialogue at her disposal we may never understand—not as long as we look to this movie for answers. So let’s Google it instead. There is surely an interesting story here.

In-between its occasional perplexing gory non-sequiturs, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is primarily concerned with a sudsy, operatic love triangle among its 40-Year-Old Virgin Queen, and the dashing Sir Walter Raleigh, and a peachy young lady-in-waiting named Bess. These three are all gaga for each other, but Elizabeth is not about to let a commoner rip her bodice, so she dooms herself instead to pale stalking and shouting down lonesome corridors until she wakes up one day and forgives everybody. Whoops, I just gave away the entire substance of this movie.

I am usually the first to defend a film for the quality of its craftsmanship, and true to that role I will earnestly give this movie credit where it’s due. Elizabeth: The Golden Age features spectacular digital vistas, sumptuous costumes and wigs, and beautiful lighting—which means, all other things being equal, this movie is exactly as good as Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

But on the subject of craftsmanship, this film is also a terrific example of fundamentally bad directing, screenwriting, and editing. There are lots of fussy camera angles and elaborately framed shots, but rarely for any purpose. The plot is often described rather than illustrated, except for those times when it is not even described, and the viewer is denied the simple privilege of any frame of reference for the action on screen. The screenplay feels about half-written; there are numerous scenes with only a line or two of dialogue, and many conversations that go nowhere. Making matters worse, the filmmakers compensate for this partial-script by simply hacking the scenes short and splicing them together. This film feels like it was edited in a M*A*S*H unit. Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention the score, which is not so much overbearing as it is overburdened… with the job of providing drama and substance where the screenwriters could not. A good deal of this movie is simply music and pictures. And for that, frankly, you’d do better to pop in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Folks, have you seen that movie lately? It’s really good.

There are, of course, great actors involved in this Elizabeth sequel. But Geoffrey Rush might want to sue somebody for something like “humiliating under-utilization.” Clive Owen, as Sir Walter Raleigh, emerges least scathed, primarily because he makes the most of this film’s one scene of extended and interesting dialogue. As for Cate Blanchett, she’s a professional, and she does her best with the material she’s given. But by the time she delivers her Lord of the Rings-style rallying speech from atop an agitated white steed, she seems barely able to contain her embarrassment. She looks much more comfortable during her brief nude scene, leading me to wonder if perhaps the scene was her idea. I imagine her convincing the director to include it as a statement of Elizabeth’s suppressed and suddenly awakened sexuality, when in fact she means it as a statement to the audience about the film in which she’s trapped. If so, she’s quite right. This empress has no clothes.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld