Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Like Bette Davis before her, Cate Blanchett has now, with the release of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, played Elizabeth I twice. That may be an accomplishment of sorts—fans will relish this bit of trivia as further proof of her alliance with those smart, brassy dames of Hollywood’s Golden Age—though it’s worth noting that Davis’s two turns as Elizabeth were, while iconic, hardly the height of her career. Indeed, like The Virgin Queen, Davis’s last Elizabeth picture, Elizabeth: The Golden Age (which might be seen as The Virgin Queen: Redux) is pretty much a stinker. At first it’s at least an entertaining stinker: opening scenes of Blanchett presiding over her court—particularly one in which she grudgingly accepts Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen, increasingly ludicrous with each film he makes)—are the stuff of high camp, and the irony with which Blanchett weathers them is impressive; this is what Greta Garbo did to such great effect in Queen Christina. But Elizabeth: The Golden Age all too soon melts into a stylish, historically spurious gumbo. Elizabeth’s relationship with Raleigh gets semi-romantic, his attraction to her lady-in-waiting spurring the Queen’s jealousy; an uncovered assassination plot leads to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (an uncharacteristically atrocious Samantha Morton), an act that, apparently, was all Sir Francis Walsingham’s (Geoffrey Rush) doing, not Elizabeth’s. This latter bit—plus a ridiculous rendering of the Spaniards as proto-jihadists—pits Elizabeth as a sympathetic, secular humanist career woman, when she was, in reality, the heir of a fundamentalist murderer, and a skilful manipulator of the political, social and religious rhetoric that might have quelled her. That such thorny attributes are evident even in Davis’s stagy portrayals of more than 50 years ago makes Elizabeth: The Golden Age seem both a waste (especially of Blanchett’s ample talents) and a simple-minded, arrogantly inaccurate sham. SKIP IT

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is now playing at the Scotiabank Theatre Toronto (259 Richmond St. W.), Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.), SilverCity Yonge Eglinton Centre (2300 Yonge St.) and others.