I wonder if director Shekar Kapur thought he’d ever make a sequel to his 1998 take on the Virgin Queen?
It seems unlikely: in his and scriptwriter Michael Hirst’s general playing fast-and-loose with history, the period around Elizabeth I’s accession (in 1558) was made to include many events from well into her long reign. But then perhaps Kapur thought that if he did do a sequel it could leap forward three decades to the key year of 1588, when the Spanish Armada posed the most serious external threat Elizabeth and England had yet faced.
And so it has come to pass. Elizabeth: The Golden Age depicts a series of events that happened more or less around the time of the Armada, give or take a few years, and the filmmakers confine themselves to condensing these events into a limited time frame.
So Sir Walter Raleigh arrives at court requesting a royal charter to found colonies in America; it would be less exciting to know that he had received such a charter years previously (it’s dated 1584). It would also be less thrilling to know that his illicit affair with one of the queen’s chambermaids only came to light some years after the Armada had been defeated, rather than practically as the Spanish galleons set sail.
But, as we learned from films such as Gladiator, we can live with historical inaccuracy if the movie is good enough as narrative. As long as it doesn’t become too absurd, or break the period frame too abruptly, or even if it does so but with sufficient irony and self-consciousness, it’s okay. Movies such as 300 and Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great are examples of how not to do it. Kapur and his collaborators certainly managed to make an engrossing film in the original Elizabeth; the virtues of the follow-up, though, are less certain.
Elizabeth, in the shape of Cate Blanchett, appears to have barely aged a day in the 30 years since she took the throne. She does have some hair trouble, though, as impor-tant scenes show — mostly, she hasn’t got any, and has to rely on baroque wigs. When she rides out in armour to encourage the troops as the Armada approaches, though, she has long reddish locks and even the odd ponytail: has her hair grown, or is this also a wig?
The artifice that went into Elizabeth’s appearance is well evinced in the movie. The monarch’s image was a vital part of royal propaganda. We get a sense of how much effort it took for Elizabeth to keep up her queenly presentation. For the most part, the costumes on display here are magnificent. Unfortunately, though, at a certain point the costume department seems to have run out of garmentry, and Elizabeth stays in the same purple dress for what feels like days at a time. Perhaps she’s just depressed and doesn’t feel like changing.
Such a lack of clarity afflicts The Golden Age at intervals, which is a pity because other parts work well. The interactions between Elizabeth and Raleigh have a crackle to them, as does the relationship between the queen and her chambermaid, Bess (Abbie Cornish). These show how intimacy and, indeed, self-respect may be difficult for a queen to achieve.
As Raleigh, Clive Owen doesn’t look anything like the foxy intellectual adventurer visible in the Nicholas Hilliard portrait of the mid-1580s — Raleigh was not just a seafarer but also wrote a History of the World when not busy being a rather brutal suppressor of rebellions or introducing tobacco to Europe. On his own terms, though, Owen works a charm in the role. He certainly convinces as a swashbuckling pioneer, even with the touch of Captain Jack Sparrow the part necessarily contains. If only someone would remake Captain Blood or The Sea Hawk, with Owen in the lead, we’d have an Errol Flynn for our time. Who needs James Bond?
As for the rest of The Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush returns as Elizabeth’s spymaster, Walsingham. He seems less interested in the boys than before, but deals efficiently with a conspiracy against the queen that is, in the film, mythologised (as well as being a conflation of two different plots). By the time we get to the Armada, the King of Spain’s most concerted attempt to destroy his erstwhile sister-in-law, the Queen Elizabeth story is rollicking along with some energy, mixing royal soap opera and action movie with reasonable élan. Certainly, this historical picture is closer to the BBC’s The Tudors than it is to a conventional biography of Elizabeth. (Not so coincidentally, The Tudors was co-written by Hirst.) And if this golden age includes the likes of Shakespeare, he’s nowhere to be seen.
For a climax, the depiction of the Armada is somewhat underpowered — as though Kapur et al ran out of budget for the requisite computer-generated effects. It just about passes muster, though; what doesn’t is the very obvious appearance of the boom in the frame at a vital moment.
The Golden Age also suffers from a lack of rhythm in its storytelling: too often it feels like we’re simply rushing from pillar to post to pillar in yet another architectural marvel. Nonetheless, in general the movie entertains: there’s enough sexy fire in Owen’s Raleigh and enough twitchy regality in Blanchett’s blanched face to keep one engaged.