Review

Review Date: 14-October-07
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

In Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth" (1998), Cate Blanchett depicted Elizabeth I's transformation from a susceptible girl to a queen who asserted that she had no master, be it man or human emotion. In his follow-up nine years later, Blanchett portrays the queen's transformation from a woman having a mid-life crisis to ... a woman having a mid-life crisis consoled by the fact that her enemy is vanquished. The moody atmosphere remains intact, but the edge of the first film has been dulled by the passage of time.

Now, I cannot deny the allure of Blanchett and Clive Owen playing dress-up, their gorgeousness enhanced by 16th-century duds and plush tapestries. Owen dons the boots of adventurer Walter Raleigh, who rose to prominence by harassing superpower Spain at sea. How unfortunate that Kapur, using a script by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst, maroons these two with little to do but pout and smolder. Elizabeth's problem — besides an empty treasury and Spanish schemes to place Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) on the throne — is that she has not been kissed in a very long time. Certainly one can understand the loneliness of an unmarried female monarch in an era when women's only accepted role was docile motherhood. But watching Elizabeth play the frustrated schoolgirl as Raleigh's affection waffles between herself and her lady-in-waiting (Abbie Cornish) is a letdown after the original clash between her interior life and exterior station.

The only meatier theme is that of religion doing what it does best, i.e., bringing out the worst in people. Geoffrey Rush's Lord Walsingham continues to plot, torture, and murder to prevent the evil Catholics from harming his Protestant queen. And indeed the Catholics here are evil in a laughable way. King Philip of Spain is a parody of sanctimonious megalomania, haunting his cathedral with a creepy little daughter in tow, while Rhys Ifans picks up where Daniel Craig left off as an ordained assassin who appears in a whirl of sexy black and proceeds to go absolutely nowhere.

Matters do improve as the Spanish Armada finally sails to England and Elizabeth summons some gumption, appearing Joan of Arc-like to rouse her troops. Owen swings on a ship's hawser à la Jack Sparrow and Kapur tries the poetry of signal fires à la Peter Jackson. Though invigorating, these touches are too little, too late to resuscitate the drab entirety of the tale.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.