Review of The Favourite (2018) by Hnestlyonthesly — 12 Oct 2019

There’s a beautiful kind of symmetry in finishing the year off with another Rachel Weisz film after having begun this foolhardy endeavor to review every film I’ve seen in theaters back sometime in May. I’ve come around to The Favourite by a roundabout sort of way through a discovery that my Wife’s favorite film as a teenager was a Australian indie called The Rage in Placid Lake, a dry comedy about a young man on the edge of young adulthood who rebels against his well-meaning, liberal, progressive parents by playing the System and becoming the Man. It actually feels like a film that has grown more relevant over time, reminds me that even twenty years ago, we had the answers all along, but without sufficient awareness of those woke platitudes, no social-emotional growth can occur. (I wrote a little bit about this phenomena of well-meaning parents and unhelpful wokeness in my review of Ralph Breaks the Internet of all places.).

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Anyway, after acquainting myself with that acidic wit, I had high expectations for The Favourite, and they were surpassed today.

The Favourite presents itself as a modest comedy of manners: the stakes are modest, domestic, and yet the story is set with the backdrop of a looming battle in faraway France that threatens to maybe or maybe not end life as we know it for Queen Anne and her country. The nebulousness of violence Over There coupled with its immediacy as a matter of state sets the film apart from other dramas that are primarily focused on the minutiae of courtly intrigue and hurt feelings of the landed aristocracy. Not every story set in England has to be about geopolitics, but we ought not romanticize the wealth and privilege of lives lived without a recognition of the tremendous amount of violence and bloodshed that makes those lives possible, in the same way that we rightly balk at the Plantation sheik aesthetic. The Favourite’s found a way to bridge the gap and excellently captures the peculiarly American cultural disconnect with its wars abroad.

The Favourite‘s formalist plot structure, organized into six chapters, anticipates lines and builds tension in a way that feels appropriately pretentious and self-aware. One of the challenges of historical fiction is whether the film can justify its relevance. This was the issue with Phantom Thread for me (a film I dearly love). It’s that feeling you get when you watch a Shakespeare play set in steampunk and you don’t know why. Historicity for the sake of historicity is not interesting. Slavish attention to historical accuracy is not a virtue, as movies like A Knight’s Tale and Robin Hood: Men in Tights will attest (also, films that are sort of out of time like It Follows and less notably, The Love Witch, which is actually a terrible example and shouldn’t really be considered beyond this point). The Favourite bends the rules when it needs to: the dance scenes that resist cliches, the shooting range, the way in which Abigail and Sarah break gender norms without the script being preachy about it (as Wife put it) in subversive one-liners (“I am a woman, how could I acquire a horse?”).

The trailers gags don’t give away punchlines, they set them up, much like Eighth Grade. For someone who was looking at this film in terms of the development of the screenwriter’s politics and craft (in the same way that Amy Sherman Palladino’s Marvelous Ms Maisel builds on Gilmore Girls or The Last Dragon Prince builds on Avatar: TLA), the most interesting scenes are those of sex and courtship, which give an expansive and nuanced depiction of different forms of erotic relationships and add to our understanding of characters.

The Favourite is worth a look: lovely performances, dark humor, and an ending that resists the easy outs of storytelling.