It seems interesting when we talk about facing Queen Elizabeth I (Kate Blanchett) who has been facing more threats to her rule from abroad. The Queen found herself in front of a strange bend where she must endure multiple crises in her late era including tile plots, assassination plot, Spanish armada and other serious challenges.
This is romantic fantasy, not history, and much of the time you fully expect Kapur, here making his third post-Bollywood feature, to turn his cast loose in song and dance.
As an historical reenactment it suffers from a great deal of simplification in order to make complex events quickly and easily understandable, and as a drama it suffers from a great deal of build that never really pays on it's promise.
Every shot, every costume is decadent with color, and every single twitch of Blanchett's face is imbued with meaning as she negotiates her way through her warring roles of being a woman and being a queen.
Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age, from a screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst, turned out to be more rousingly entertaining than many of its less-than-lukewarm reviews had led me to anticipate.
I can almost recommend this film as a great-looking, bombastic guilty pleasure. But the soundtrack is unbearable, the soap opera love triangle -- laughable.
Matt's Movie Reviews
July 07, 2010
While the performances keep the film afloat, Kapur's over indulgent direction and his inadequate interpretation of history comes dangerously close to running it aground.
