Review of The Favourite (2018) by Clarisesamuels — 07 Feb 2019

Sometimes you have to wonder what the critics are looking for in an Oscar-worthy movie, and how they manage to find it in a film like The Favourite. This what-if-Queen-Anne’s-court-was-lesbian premise is historically off the wall, given that two of the protagonists, Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) were historically documented to be extremely devoted to their husbands. The historical basis for the lesbian theme apparently harks back to some vindictive rumors that were circulated during Queen Anne’s reign (1702–1707 as Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and then until 1714 as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland) by malicious and jealous courtiers. At Versailles such a scenario might have been plausible, but the stodgy, uptight English court of the eighteenth century? The French Catholic aristocracy felt they needed a priest only twice in their lives—when they married and when they died—but the English took the Anglican Church and the wages of sin very seriously. Since Henry VIII, the ruling monarch has been the head of the Church of England, and this kind of liberated behavior would have been severely repressed during this era.

So the film has to be accepted as a fantasy, and a wild, absurdist one at that. Billed as a comedy-drama, it’s not that humorous. I didn’t laugh once. The actors are consummate professionals, and the costumes and period sets are perfect; nevertheless, the film is wearisome. Dark hallways looming up at the camera and a preoccupation with a wide-angle lens distortion known as pincushioning (usually considered a photographic flaw but used in this film as a feature) are recurring stylistic devices. Colman’s acting in the role of Queen Anne is of the highest caliber, but she always has to act sick, moody, and on the verge of hysterics, so her character is also wearisome. Her Queen Anne seems to be quite stupid and unable to comprehend politics, economics, military strategy or anything that does not cater to her sexual needs and her personal vanity. Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are rivals for the Queen’s affections, and their characters display the worst kind of female wiles and weaknesses, stopping just short of hair-pulling and scratching each other’s eyes out. Scenes are introduced with text graphics that are random quotations, sometimes skewing the letters with arbitrary spacing. The film is artistically conceited. In the end, it does not produce the desired effect, which presumably is to depict the absurdist and existentialist view that there is no intrinsic meaning in life. The musical score is as pretentious as the rest of it, vacillating between Baroque violins and a bizarre chiming sound that is supposed to set a mood but is instead unnerving and bewildering.