The Favourite (5/5 Stars)

“The Favourite” was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Now here is a director whom I have a love/hate relationship with. I have seen three movies of his, rated the first (“The Lobster”) five stars, the second (“The Killing of a Sacred Deer”) with one star, and now the third, “The Favourite” five stars again. The style of Lanthimos does not change all that much, film by film. The main difference between “The Lobster” and “The Favourite” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is that Sacred Deer takes place in the present day with supposedly normal people. “The Lobster” by contrast took place in a futuristic society with humans that consistently did not act like humans. The setting of “The Favourite” though obstensibly historical is more in line with a setting like “The Lobster” in fact that is part of what makes it so funny. “The Favourite” presents an absurd historical scenario. It concerns the short reign of Queen Anne of England (played by Olivia Coleman) who reigned in the first decade of the 18^th century. Queen Anne has no business being on the throne. She has been involuntarily been delegated the task of ruling a nation through the childless efforts of the past three Tudor kings. She herself lost seventeen children within fifteen years to miscarraige, still-birth, and infant mortality. Such a history would make any person a little unhinged if not completely crazy. Queen Anne is no exception. She will be the last of the Tudor dynasty and it shows.

This consistently ill (her maladies include fevers and gout), generally burnt out and severely insecure lady nevertheless has enormous influence over the fate of the nation. She never leaves the house (to be fair it is a big palace) so the most important decision makers in the nation camp out in her court waiting for her to be well enough to attempt to address the issues of the day. “The Favourite” refers to the woman who at the moment has the most weight with the Queen. This is not a merit based position. It takes fierce ambition, the capacity for much mean girl backstabbing, and a mental limberness that allows one to completely subjugate one’s thoughts and feelings to the whims of a sick crazy woman in order to ultimately manipulate all the other people around her. Does Yorgos Lanthimos show Queen Anne or her sycophants any sympathy. Absolutely none. At times this seems unnecessarily cruel, but given that all the people involved are running an incompetent and irresponsible government it is very much what they all deserve. It’s okay to laugh at these people. They are all doing terrible things. “The Favourite” would make a great double-feature with “The Death of Stalin”. If you ever feel bad about democracy, go and watch these two movies back to back.

The original favourite is Lady Sarah (played by Rachel Weisz). Her ambitions are mainly political. She wants the Queen to finance a war with France. The subject is brought up constantly in this vague abstract way that can’t possibly lead to competent decisions about it no matter what side they ultimately fall upon. Lady Sarah’s political opponent is the leader of the opposition, Lord Harley (played by Nicholas Hoult). Court dramas are generally stiff affairs what with the costumes and the elevated language. Not so with “The Favourite”. Lord Harley is dressed like an insane clown. He has this big white wig, way too much white face makeup, and stupidly high heels. Nicholas Hoult is already a tall actor. Put heels on him and he absolutely towers over the women of the story. It is rather funny how this towering man with a large powerful constituency has to ingratiate himself to a fickle weak women by his dumb dress and absurd courtly manners. Nicholas Hoult has become an eminently watchable actor. This is the same guy who played Nux in “Mad Max: Fury Road” and amazingly, the boy in “About a Boy”. There is a certain confidence he can bring to odd characters that put at least his work in “The Favourite” on the level of a Robert Downey Jr., Sam Rockwell, or Christopher Walken. The man just walks around and kills it in every scene.

Because Lady Sarah’s ambitions are mainly political, she fails to notice at first the upstart Abigail (played by Emma Stone) who has designs on the Queen herself. Abigail does not particularly care whether the war is financed. She wants the Queen’s attention to elevate her position from a servant girl into something more. Her first successes in winning the Queen’s favors draws the attention of Lord Harley. Lord Harley is willing to arrange a wedding with a Lord for Abigail that will automatically elevate her to the nobility herself, in a polite exchange of course for Abigail’s services in backstabbing mean-girl style Lady Sarah’s relationship with the Queen. The movie resembles more “Heathers” than any Merchant and Ivory costume drama and I mean that in the best way.

“The Favourite” presents the learned viewer with a view to a historical anomaly in the stature of women. Three hundred years ago, the women of England had no greater political rights than any other women in the world and no other women in the world at that time had any political rights for the last several thousand years. However, England like other countries had a hereditary monarchy, and in a hereditary monarchy, a woman (not women) could have considerable power given their access to the royal persons. (In the case of England’s Queen Elizabeth, it was possible that a hereditary monarchy could even luck into a great monarch in the form of a woman.) An influential woman in the court of a hereditary monarchy could have the type of power akin to the President’s Chief of Staff in our system. They could direct the monarch’s attention to certain matters and enable or restrict access to the monarch from various constituencies. Lady Sarah does exactly that in “The Favourite”. It is an interesting historical fact that although women were universally oppressed for all of human history, they were most able to attain power in the most oppressive of governments. It was not unnoticed by the Ancient Greeks when they compared their government, a direct democracy (which limited rights only to men), to that of Persia, whose royal courts were continually dominated by the mothers and wives of the emperors. The United States of America is a good modern example. It has been almost 250 years and we have yet to elect a woman as president. Meanwhile anti-liberal states like Pakistan and Myanmar have both had woman heads-of-state in the past 50 years. These women are not coincidentally family members of important political dynasties. Political power spread wide but unevenly as in Ancient Greece and the United States (at least until the 1970s) keeps women from power. Political power tightly held routinely ends up in the hands of a woman.

But what type of woman gains this power? The movies in today’s time have a conundrum that will be a hard needle to thread. How do we, in this newly woke society, treat women in history. We want to tell stories that show empowered women. However, as much as women in power hundreds of years ago may have been ambitious, may have been brilliant, and may have been heroic in their intentions, they were all confined by the misogynistic structure of society. Thus, to gain any power, they would all need to be cunning, scheming, and duplicitous. “The Favourite” shows this dynamic in spades and contains fully-developed interesting female characters. An example of how to not to thread this needle is the last several seasons of “Game of Thrones” TV series which has bowed to consistent pressure as to how it portrays women in its medieval fantasy land. The most annoying example is the nine-year-old Lady Mormont who speaks with vivacity and eloquence to large groups of male warriors and sometimes even persuades them to change political tacks. It is totally unbelievable that these men would let her into the room and even more unbelievable that they would be persuaded by her words, which are even more unbelievable in that they come from a nine-year-old child (you can contrast her behavior with that of Bran who was also a child lord). I suppose in this season of #MeToo, women characters must all be born with an unreal amount of pluck and wisdom lest the creators be branded sexist. A certain amount of complexity in character development is sacrificed when a movie inserts unreality into a historical situations for modern political purposes. The women in “The Favourite” given the society they live in, must adapt in sometimes deceitful and amoral ways. This makes them more interesting and, in my opinion, a better movie. Political correctness be damned.

Bohemian Rhapsody (3/5 Stars)

A movie with a Queen soundtrack is automatically good.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” belongs to that relatively new subgenre of movies, the musical biopic. These movies trace the life of a famous musician with the help of a greatest hits soundtrack. This subgenre has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are the guarantee of a soundtrack that is composed of great songs, a must have in any good movie musical, and an existing fan base that can guide the creators to the important much loved milestones/controversies of the musician’s life. The drawbacks is the inborn sense of responsibility to the musician’s brand, which can gloss over certain unsympathetic events (say the omission of multiple children by multiple women in the movie Ray while the musician was married) or act as an excuse to put the plot of the movie on autopilot. There are great movies in this genre that use the pluses and avoid the drawbacks. Ultimately they can do this by not making the musician the hero of his story, but as a means to explore deeper themes. Amadeus has a Mozart soundtrack but is ostensibly about a less famous rival of his, Salieri, and his envy. Very good movies like Get on Up and The Doors do not treat their musicians sympathetically at all and act more like cautionary tales about fame and/or drugs. It is rare that a musical biopic can have it both ways: an exception would be What’s Love Got to Do With It, which believably portrayed Tina Turner as the hero of her life without provoking the usual cynicism.

Bohemian Rhapsody belongs to the middle-of-the pack biopics that herald a great soundtrack, make sure the fans get all the milestones/controversies they came to see, but ultimately fails to connect the music with a unique story. This movie follows an autopilot plot of early and unlikely success, large success marred by egotism, a break-up, soul-searching and an ultimate reunion for one last concert. You’ve seen this before. The music is probably better this time, but that is because Queen is a special band, not because the movie is a special movie.

Having said that, I enjoyed the entirety of the movie. How could I not? They were playing Queen the entire time and some of the cliché scenes were rendered enjoyable simply by the truth of it all. Did a producer really drop Queen after hearing their magnum opus album “A Night at the Opera” because he did not like/understand “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Yes, apparently this happened. The recluse Mike Myers drops in for a cameo scene as the clueless producer in order to milk this scene for all its worth. When the band exits the producer’s office they warn that the producer will be always be remembered as the man who lost Queen. This is the type of movie that has no qualms about unfairly utilizing 20/20 hindsight. Still its enjoyable because its true. What a dolt.

Bohemian Rhapsody may be notable in that its autopilot plot noticeably avoids a take on Freddie Mercury that would plausibly argue that he was a great figure in a continuing cultural battle. Freddie Mercury was gay at a time when he could not be open about it. However this biopic is not all that concerned with any prejudice Freddie Mercury may have encountered (his rift with his parents is much broader than sexuality given that they are conservative Zoarastrians from Zimbabwe) and portray him as a figure fighting for gay rights. In fact, his first wife is glowingly portrayed while the character the movie decides to make its villain is Freddie Mercury’s first gay lover and his gateway into the homosexual lifestyle of the late 70s and early 80s. It is there through debauched partying that Freddie contracts AIDS, a truth that the movie does not describe in detail and does not ask the audience to sympathize with in any particular way. The story ends with the LiveAid concert for Africa wherein a healthy and robust Freddie strutted and performed before an audience of one billion people. His death a mere five years later is not shown. I wonder whether had this movie been made ten or twenty years ago perhaps this part of Freddie’s story would have had a more central importance to the movie. Now that the cultural argument seems to have been all but won in favor of homosexuality, perhaps we will see the argument sidestepped more often and even more villains garbed in studded leather jackets.

Freddie Mercury is played by Rami Malek, a decent casting choice. Rami Malek and Freddie Mercury both look vaguely foreign in the same unique way that it almost seems like Bohemian Rhapsody was a movie waiting for Rami Malek to become famous before it could get made. Rami Malek does a fine job in performing Freddie moves on stage. However, there is a slight problem here. Rami has to be about five or six inches too short and it apparent in several scenes where he is sharing a stage with other actors who should be the same height or shorter than he is. It is possible to heighten an actor in a movie. Steven Spielberg somehow plausibly grew Daniel Day-Lewis by seven or eight inches to play Abraham Lincoln. Bohemian Rhapsody fails to perform the same magic with Rami Malek and this hurts his ability to project Freddie Mercury’s stage presence. You can look at a YouTube video of the LiveAid concert alongside the movie’s shot by shot performance of the same concert and see what I mean. At the end of the day, Rami Malek falls short of Freddie Mercury.

The director of this movie was Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men) who has done some very good movies in the past. Apparently he was fired half-way through for allegations that have not been fully revealed but seem connected to the #MeToo movement in a Kevin Spacey-like way. Dexter Fletcher took over and made a safe mediocre movie. I’m not sure what Bryan Singer was doing, but I bet it wasn’t too much different than the world that Freddie Mercury was apart of for awhile. A more ambitious movie may have explored that a little further, but perhaps we are not ready for that yet. It certainly wouldn’t fit the operatic bouyant eminently entertaining music of Queen all that well.