Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Nine years after Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur and Cate Blanchett return to the same queen, now long on the throne and surrounded by people who want her off it. Michael Hirst and William Nicholson’s screenplay runs three stories at once: King Philip II of Spain (Jordi Mollà) building a fleet and praying over it, Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) writing letters from a locked house, and Elizabeth herself falling for a sailor with mud on his boots. Kapur wants all three played at the same pitch for 114 minutes, and the pitch he picks is the top one.

Blanchett is the reason it holds together at all. She plays Elizabeth as a woman who has been performing for so long that she can hear her own effects and is tired of them. When Kapur stops moving the camera and lets her look in a mirror, the film is briefly about something. The parade of suitors is funny, Blanchett taking a nervous young archduke’s hand and watching him sweat, and her scenes with Geoffrey Rush’s ailing Walsingham have the shorthand of two people who have kept the same secrets for decades.

Morton gives Mary a soft Scots burr and a stillness nothing else here has, and Tom Hollander, as her jailer Amyas Paulet, plays a decent man who disapproves of his prisoner’s cushions. Rhys Ifans hisses pleasantly as the Jesuit Robert Reston. Abbie Cornish, as Elizabeth Throckmorton, the lady-in-waiting sent to keep Raleigh company, has little to do but be looked at. Clive Owen is the difficulty. He plays Sir Walter Raleigh as a man who has read about swagger, and he delivers Hirst and Nicholson’s speeches about the sea as though reading them off a card. We did not believe for a moment that this queen would lose sleep over this man, and the middle of the film needs us to.

Alexandra Byrne’s costumes are the best thing in it. The collars stand up behind Blanchett’s head like sails; the gowns go from gold to red to black as the news gets worse; there is a white nightdress for the cliffs and gilt armour for the horse. Remi Adefarasin shoots much of it from above, or through grilles and between pillars, so the queen is always behind bars of one kind or another. It is a clear idea and he has it about forty times. Guy Hendrix Dyas gives England grey stone and high windows, and Philip’s Spain black walls and candles by the thousand.

The score is the complaint most critics have made, and they are right. Craig Armstrong and A. R. Rahman keep choirs and drums running under conversations that would be tense on their own, and the music has one volume. Jill Bilcock and Andrew Haddock cut to it rather than to the actors, so two people talking in a corridor are edited like the approach to a battle, and when the battle arrives there is nowhere left to go.

The Armada is where the money went, and for a few minutes it is good. The English fire ships drift out at night towards the Spanish line, Blanchett stands on the cliff in white with her hair down, and we sat forward, surprised to feel something like the dread the film had been promising. Then Kapur cuts underwater to drowning horses in slow motion, Raleigh swings across to a Spanish deck on a rope, and the dread went. The sea battle takes less screen time than the suitors.

The first film was about a girl finding out what the throne would cost her, and it ended with her paying. This one begins with the bill settled and finds she has nowhere further to go, so the writers give her a crush and a theme. The theme is faith and fear, and the film handles it by having people say the words. Philip gets most of them.

Most critics split down the middle, half entertained and half worn out, and so are we. See it for Blanchett and Byrne, who between them make a better film than the one around them. At home, turn the sound down a notch; the dialogue survives and the choir does not need the help.