Elizabeth: The Golden Age ****


Like A Virgin ... Touched For the Second Time

Director: Shekhar Kapur

Writers: William Nicholson, Michael Hirst

Stars: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Abbie Cornish, Samantha Morton, Clive Owen, Rhys Ifans


The first Elizabeth is epic filmmaking at its best: it reinvented the staid costume drama with an enema of sex, poison and jolting violence. Blanchett and Rush are both on the record as saying they would never consider a sequel unless a great script came along, and it is a full nine years afterwards that we see this: reportedly the second in a trilogy about the Virgin Queen.

The film opens a good twenty years after the previous one ended; technically the Queen is in her fifties (although Cate Blanchett is looking mighty good) and still refusing suitors left, right and centre, most notably from Germany and Spain. We see that has grown into herself since the last film; where there she was bewildered and tentative, here she is wise, whether playing the Amazonian warrior (complete with armour and somewhat inexplicable hair extensions) or holding court. It is in matters of the heart that we see her conflict: in order to maintain her power and peace in the kingdom, she has sacrificed personal relationships, and her closest friendship is with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Bess (Cornish). Then Walter Raleigh (Owen) returns from across the seas: tanned, buff, bearded, buckled ... and bringing gifts of potatoes ("you eat it"), tobacco ("you smoke it"), and syphillis* ("you ... never mind...") As he sweeps the Spanish ambassador out of the way (yes, really ...) begins to tell the tales of his journeys, violins begin to play (yes, really ...) and the Queen and Bess are both transfixed by the swashbuckling hero.

For a film about Britain's most beloved sovereign, the cast boasts a lot of Antipodeans, with three of the four lead roles held by Australians. Rush is, as ever, charismatic, seedy and powerful reprising his role as Walsingham, and it should really go without saying that Blanchett is commanding, tempestuous and conflicted as the mighty Virgin Queen. Cornish, a magentic screen presence in Australian indies Candy and Somersault, is very beautiful but a little insipid here, which may be down to a hastily-sketched character rather than her own shortcomings as an actress. She is also the only of the Aussies not to get the accent quite spot-on.

The script is preposterous at times but the epic scale of the film and the talent of the actors masks the clunky dialogue. The writers have played hard and fast with history (the affair and marriage between Bess and Raleigh happened long after the Armada, and in fact Raleigh was safe on dry land and nursing a cold while Sir Francis Drake led the British navy to victory). They have included several nods to the myths of the time (Raleigh's first meeting with Elizabeth, in which he sweeps down his cloak to cover a puddle, is the stuff British myth, as is her address to the troops in Dover) and the audience is carried along at a thrilling pace.

* This is, obviously, a lie. Syphillis was around long before Raleigh made it popular... Elizabeth's father himself actually died from it.



CONCLUSION: Overblown it may be, but this is still a rollicking good ride, full of intrigue, passion, conflict and treachery. The heroine is sharp and the performances all strong, but you can't help but think the first film deserved a more worthy successor.