Director: Shekhar Kapur
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Fiennes
Have I Seen It Before: Yes… Although memory does fade. I do remember bits about the beginning, and friends in middle school—we were a weird crowd, I’ll admit—turned their nose up at Shakespeare in Love (1998) in favor of this movie, despite them both having almost identical casts.
Did I Like It: And its those memories I can’t help but think of when watching the film now. It’s the average biopics that grab your attention in the early minutes, and then are content to rest on their laurels while the script goes through the bullet points of a wikipedia article* while an actor goes blindly hunting for an Oscar. It predated this film, and the one I’m about to mention, but I’ve come to think of it as <Napoleon (2023)> syndrome. In that later film, Robespierre (Sam Troughton) fails to succesfully shoot himself in the face, and there’s two and a half more hours of Joaquin Phoenix diligently avoiding speaking French.
Here, before Blanchett spends an entrie movie kinda, sorta looking like the painting of the Queen, we are treated to an absolute horror show of the reign of Bloody Mary (Kathy Burke). The final days of Henry VIII’s first daughter as depicted hin this film might have inspired a strongly-worded letter from the Catholic League, the prior queen was also depicted like a Burton-style Batman villain. Cancer is terrible, but it looks to be an absolute nightmare beyond imagination in a time before decent painkillers and when the future of England’s ties to the Vatican are at stake.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie follows the rest of Napoleon syndrome and there is not a lot of structured story left to tell about the early reign of Elizabeth. At least Shakespeare in Love is trying to tell me a story.
*Or Encarta. Whatever the hell we used back then.