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.