This week saw the release of “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.” Quick on the heels of the imprimatur of the solidly conservative Economist stating that the 2008 election is Hillary’s to lose, the film gives life to our culture’s fascination with the fantasy of a strong (feminist?) woman’s leadership.
The film caps off a decade-long fascination with the “Virgin Queen,” with some of the leading actresses of our time, Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, and even Judi Dench, playing her. Not to mention the fabulous Quentin Crisp as her in the film version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This latest features Cate Blanchett at the moment of threats to her by the Catholic Monarchy of Phillip II. With the tag line, “Woman Warrior Queen,” we see a strong woman in her prime defending a nation under mortal threat.
As the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis writes, “she invokes 
God and country, blood and honor, life and death, bringing to mind at once Joan of Arc, Henry V, Winston Churchill and Tony Blair in one gaspingly unbelievable, cinematically climactic moment.” Marching to the same drummer, Hillary meticulously exudes presidential gravitas, sticking to an ardently militarist method to overcome her gender – joining the Armed Services Committee, positioning herself as a strong leader for the country in a time of crisis. Although Hillary hasn’t donned armor as Elizabeth does in the film, she has no qualms about ditching feminist norms on militarism.
In the film, Spain here evokes Al Qaeda’s fundamentalism. Multiple references to their religious intolerance and the Inquisition. Elizabeth states prior to the Spanish Armada’s attack that should they win, there will be no freedom of conscience in England. It all sounds familiar.
The film may reflect a deeper hunger for an earthy but glamorous woman’s leadership. Or maybe our need to become more comfortable with the prospect of a woman as our savior President. Hillary may not have engineered the release of the film, but it helps build a consensus around the possibilities of a woman to lead the country.
– Darren Rosenblum
Well, I am both a Cate Blanchett fan (big time) and an admirer of the first Queen Elizabeth. I suspect I’ve read most of the biographies of her life and reign as well as broader historical studies of the late Tudors.
So I took myself off to see this film over the weekend. Okay, I admit that for me Ms. Blanchett can do no wrong. Which isn’t quite the same thing as saying she done good here. The film was fun but very derivative with Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh posed in the classic Errol Flynn ready-to-board the enemy’s man o’war position. And the scene where he spreads his cloak before Her Majesty so she won’t step in a puddle…how did he keep a straight face?
The Spanish Armada could have done with more realistic CGI -frankly it reminded me of the toy boats I saw floating in Central Park a few days ago.
But parallels with today’s Islamic fundamentalism – I don’t think so. For Philip of Spain (and latterly of England too), Elizabeth represented a schismatic religion and he enjoyed the blessing of the CEO of the World’s One True Religion as Spaniards and other Catholics surveyed the situation.
Philip’s piety is accurately portrayed but so what? Spain wasn’t the world HQ of the Inquisition for nothing.
As for Elizabeth as a Queen, d/b/a A Virgin Queen, there’s no question she was one of the most remarkable women in Western history. But she used her virginity (and I’m not getting into the tired debate as to whether she really was a virgin-no one can claim at any rate that she was an English Catherine the Great) to control and master a very dangerous and fluid political situation, thereby sacrificing any genuine sexuality she may have had but which she repressed. Quite a trade-off. England benefits, she probably was genuinely lonely.
Judi Dench was a more impressive Elizabeth in brief scenes and Glenda Jackson remains the best of all.
If this film, which I expect will be available on DVD very soon after it bombs in the theaters, has the slightest impact on voters considering a possible first female president I will be stunned. The demographics for this movie, as the mean-spirited reviewer in The West Side Spirit noted last week, is the combined cohort of diehard Anglophiles and Cate Blanchett mega fans.
Now to see Ms. Blanchett as Bob Dylan!
Elizabeth disliked war. She was no peacenik but she did not like having to surrender control and initiative to the military men – as a woman, she could not lead troops in battle as her father and grandfather had done – and wars cost lots of money, which Elizabeth hated to spend.
The movie itself was bad camp, and Blanchett was not much better, IMO. She was splendid in the first picture but fails to rise above her (admittedly, pretty poor) material here. The defeat of the Armada was apparently staged in the director’s bathtub, and I was not edified by the spectacle of Gloriana begging one clandestine smooch from Sir Walter, who causes Elizabeth to palpitate like a schoolgirl, as if her court wasn’t rife with hunky numbers vying for her attention. You’d think she’d never seen a cute guy before.
It’s possible that the ‘sacrifice of her sexuality’ wasn’t that big a deal. Most royal ladies of the time had to do the same even if they did marry; they were bartered off at early ages to mates who were often too old or too short or too ugly or too sickly, etc., etc. There were many examples in front of Elizabeth of royal marriages that ended miserably.
As for Hillary, I’m rooting for her but I fear she will bomb some hapless Third World country to demonstrate her ‘toughness,’ and she is oddly silent on the matter of things like illegal wiretapping and the abuse of executive privilege.