Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 4 minutes
Director: Josie Rourke
Quick Impressions:
“Look,” I said, pointing to the screen during the end credits. “There’s a drapes master in the crew…drapes handlers…drapes assistants…”
“Well,” my husband reasoned philosophically, “there were a *@#% ton of drapes in this movie. That one scene was all drapes. If they make an Honest Trailers about it, he’ll say, ‘Starring: Drapes.'”
Personally, I think the movie could use a few more drapes. Margot Robbie should just walk around in a cloud of drapes at all times, allowing us to believe her strange take on Elizabeth I was all a figment of our imaginations. (This is honestly the weirdest interpretation of Elizabeth I that I have ever seen. She kind of reminds me of Miranda Richardson from Black Adder except this is supposed to be a drama.)
I have so many feelings about this movie. How can I put them all into words?
When I saw The Favourite, I acknowledged that I know almost nothing about Queen Anne (which I’m trying to remedy somewhat by reading a biography of her now). In contrast, I know everything about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.
Well, I mean, “everything” seems like a grandiose claim. But I was obsessed with Elizabeth from the ages of 12 to 30, and my dissertation was about Mary, Queen of Scots and the Elizabethan Complaint Poem.
I’ve read tons of popular and scholarly biographies (including the John Guy book on which this film was based). I’ve read much of their correspondence (all of their known, surviving correspondence with one another). I’ve read documents about them by their contemporaries. I’ve read a sonnet cycle written by a would-be poet who was actively standing guard over Mary Queen of Scots as he wrote it. I’ve read first hand accounts of Mary’s execution. (In fact, one of those, I painstakingly transcribed from a scanned copy of a document handwritten in the most headache-inducing Elizabethan scrawl you can imagine).
I read everything I could find (by means of extensive search).
Then I quit grad school to stay home with my daughter and did not read one word about Elizabeth or Mary for the next ten years. (Well, ten years come January second. My daughter was born at twenty-five weeks, and I just couldn’t care about what happened five-hundred years ago anymore. I just stopped being interested. In fact, I was actively avoidant, gripped by a mixture of guilt and dread. For the next several years, I had daily nightmares about not finishing my dissertation and was only able to shake them when I finally got the brilliant idea to start reading Dracula right before bed.) (That book is so atmospheric!)
So yes, Mary, Queen of Scots has dominated my waking thoughts and haunted my nightmares. I’ve actually been extremely anxious about watching this movie. (I mean, I deliberately gave myself nightmares about Dracula to improve my quality of sleep. That should give you some idea of the trauma this topic brings me.) In fact, I noticed just now that I’ve been clinching my jaw to the point of intense pain while writing this review.) But I feel much better now that I’ve seen Mary Queen of Scots. This movie can’t hurt me. It’s awful! So that’s a big relief.
The Good:
Okay, the movie is not awful.
Well, it is. But I don’t need to gloat about it. The film does do some things well. I enjoyed watching it except that it was so boring, and the intrusive score made me cringe. But it has its strong points.
“What’s up with David Tennant in this movie?” my husband whispered during the end credits. “It’s like he’s playing Scottish Rasputin.”
Laughing, I said, “Actually, that was the one character portrayal in the movie that really worked for me.” Tennant’s dour, demented, unkempt, blustering, vitriolic “Scottish Rasputin” is exactly how I have always pictured John Knox (fairly or not). (Well, I mean, it’s not fair to Rasputin. The mad monk had many flaws, but he was never a misogynist. Tennant’s Knox resembles him in looks only.)
At any rate, at moments, Tennant’s performance is almost over the top, but that’s John Knox for you.
I also like Jack Lowden’s take on Darnley. Well, “liked” is a strong word, but I find no fault with it. That’s a perfectly respectable interpretation of Henry, Lord Darnley based on the facts. I also liked Brendan Coyle as his father, the Earl of Lennox. James McArdle makes a very sympathetic Earl of Moray, too.
And I have never in my life seen such a sympathetic portrayal of Robert Dudley. It’s probably way more sympathetic than he deserves, but it’s nice to see a movie not bashing him inordinately for once. (On a related note, why is Joe Alwyn suddenly in every movie that comes out? I liked him here, and in The Favourite, and in Boy Erased, and in Operation Finale, but that’s a lot of movies in just a few months. Where did he come from?)
In general, the roles are well cast. (Martin Compston who plays Bothwell certainly looks the part.) And, shockingly, the movie gets the history broadly correct. It definitely shows the Rise-and-Fall-of-Darnley portion of the story basically as we would expect. And the four Maries are actually around, which is a nice touch.
At Elizabeth’s court, it is best not too inquire too closely into people’s identities and roles in the story. William Cecil (Guy Pearce) and Robert Dudley are there. That’s enough, I guess. Gemma Chan plays Bess of Hardwick whose inclusion in the cast list made me expect to see more of Mary’s years of captivity in England, but the film just kind of skips over this part. At least we get to see Gemma Chan who was so great as Astrid in Crazy, Rich Asians.
The film seems on much surer footing in Scotland than in England, but this is possibly just because I know so much more about Elizabeth’s court. I know far more about Mary herself than about the intricacies of the Scottish court.
I both loved and hated the last several minutes of the movie. The ending is really strange. It’s so different from what’s come before. As I watched, I started to think, “This would work better as a stage play.”
I do think I would like this treatment of the material better a stage play. The only way the Elizabeth character makes any sense is if we’re seeing her interiority dramatized. Because although Elizabeth could be both paranoid and capricious, I guarantee you she didn’t sit around in the shadows making macaroni art, lashing out like the Mummy’s bride, and giggling at foals while Mary was up in Scotland crafting policy and living life to its fullest. This film makes Elizabeth look like a nitwit barely clinging to sanity who spends her every waking minute fantasizing about pregnancy, hungering for shadow bumps, and fetishizing any semblance of life that might emerge from her vagina. In reality, Elizabeth I definitely had insecurities about her cousin, and she did sometimes voice them. But Elizabeth knew that everyone was always watching her, and so her every move, every statement was so self-consciously performative. To show her behaving with such raw, naked, uncontrollable, genuine vulnerability (so often!) is just insane unless you’re trying to show us not how she presented herself to others, but how she secretly felt.
It’s kind of a cool new way to conceive of the story. In this version, Mary is the one deliberately crafting an image. Propaganda paints her as a whore driven by emotion, but she’s actually a focused, virtuous martyr (who has barely had pleasurable sex). Elizabeth, meanwhile, may claim to have the heart and stomach of a king, but she actually has the mind and womb of a woman. She’s a moist mess of emotions. She’s the one completely driven by her vanity and passions. Unlike her unhappy cousin, the Virgin Queen is the one enjoying loving intimacy in a rewarding romantic relationship. She’s the one motivated by heedless romance and irrational terror.
I wish the movie had pushed this concept a little harder and presented the whole story in the dream-sequence-like way it handles the ending because this is all sort of like a weird revisionist fantasy. And that’s what’s interesting about the movie, not the slow, dull recounting of the Darnley marriage and blow up. (Haha.)
In real life, both Elizabeth and Mary had to reckon with powerful propaganda constantly circulating against them. Both had enemies whose worldview hinged on painting one of the queens as a paragon of feminine virtue (like the Virgin Mary) and the other as a vortex of vice, (a Whore of Babylon). Each queen tried to turn the propaganda to her advantage. Each wanted very much to take control of the narrative and shape her own image. Elizabeth understood the need for image-crafting before Mary, but Mary eventually learned from her own experiences and Elizabeth’s example.
This movie seems to want to make us ask, “What if what we’ve heard about Mary is wrong?” But I think it falls into the Tudor trap of thinking that if one of these women is virtuous, the other must be crazy (at best). That’s a stunted view, crippled by the continued potency of centuries-old propaganda.
Still, we don’t often see Elizabeth portrayed as the crazy, wild, passion-driven one. I think it would be better to throw out the whole false dichotomy, but it is still passably interesting just to go as far as the film does and suggest that (though yes, there must be a crazy one), the crazy one is Elizabeth.
You know what? Now that I’ve written all this, I remember having the same complaint about several recent biographies back when I was writing my dissertation, and the John Guy biography may have been one of them (though there was another much worse offender). The propaganda of the Elizabethan age is just too persuasive. It confuses writers to this day.
But I will confess that I have never seen Elizabeth I played on the screen like this before. That’s by far the most interesting aspect of Mary Queen of Scots, even though I find the characterization of Elizabeth dishonest and inaccurate.
If we just throw out historical accuracy (or blow it up and strangle it in a field, whatever works), then I will admit that both Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie give immensely captivating performances. I would even be fine with them actually getting Oscar nominations.
Well, I wouldn’t really. Ronan would get a nod at someone else’s expense. But maybe Robbie could sneak into supporting. It is a memorably weird take on Elizabeth. I’ve never seen another one like it.
Best Scene:
Ordinarily it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me when Elizabeth and Mary meet in movies (which they always do) because they never once met in person.
But in this movie, their strange meeting is my favorite scene. It’s so trippy and ephemeral, like it exists in some liminal space where you might find Harry Potter and Dumbledore wandering around in deep conversation.
Best Action Sequence:
Naturally Rizzio’s last big scene makes quite an impression.
Best Scene Visually:
I like the costuming in this movie. Mary’s martyr dress is particularly striking. (She thought so, too. That was the point.) And the men’s clothing makes them look like they mean business to twenty-first century eyes. At times, we don’t notice that they’re wearing the styles of a much earlier period, yet they are basically. I’m not a fashion designer, so I don’t know how this was accomplished, but I was impressed.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Saoirse Ronan:
Saoirse Ronan is so much fun to watch in interviews that I would be happy to see her in the conversation for Best Actress again. But there are about ten people fighting for a spot in Best Actress this year, and based on the other performances I’ve seen, I don’t see how there’s room for her. The performance is excellent, but not one of the five best of the year.
I have serious problems with the characterization of Mary in this film, but none of that is Ronan’s fault. She gives a strong turn as Mary and carries much of the movie.
I like her conception scene with Darnley and her heart-to-heart with her brother about when he used to lift her up as a child.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Margot Robbie:
I’ve never seen another interpretation of Elizabeth quite like this one. I don’t like it, but it would be interesting to view alongside others at some kind of Elizabeth symposium.
Margot Robbie is a gifted actress, a rising star, and a beautiful woman who wears fake small pox scars and a bald(ish) wig for this role. I could conceive of her following up her SAG nomination with an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actress.
She does give a compelling performance, though the character she’s playing seems rather far removed from the Elizabeth I whom I have always imagined.
She seems most like the usual Elizabeth in her scene with William Cecil, in which she agrees to destabilize Scotland as long as she knows nothing about the details. I like her there.
The Negatives:
Aside from the Bizarro World take on Elizabeth, I had three basic problems with this movie.
1) It does not provide adequate historical context for the story. Yes, history gets complicated. Yes, I hate clunky exposition as much as the next person. But we really need to know why Mary thinks she has a superior claim to England’s throne. It’s because from a Catholic point of view, she does. Roman Catholics did not believe Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife was valid, making Elizabeth (daughter of his second “wife”) illegitimate. As the legitimate granddaughter of Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret, Mary Stuart had the superior claim to the throne (from a Catholic point of view). (It goes Henry VII, his daughter Margaret, her son James, then Mary by his wife, as opposed to Henry VII, his son Henry VIII, then Elizabeth by his mistress.)
Also, Mary Stuart began calling herself Queen of England before she even went back to Scotland. She and her husband Francois were being called King and Queen of England on official documents circulated all over Europe before they were even King and Queen of France. (Granted, Mary was probably not the one pushing for this, but she definitely believed it.)
And quite a number of influential Catholics (even in England) also believed that Mary was the rightful queen (or they pretended to when it suited their designs). This film doesn’t explain any of that. As a result, Mary looks naively haughty, Elizabeth groundlessly paranoid. Admittedly, Mary was a bit naive when she began ruling Scotland, but people in high places on the continent supported her notion that she was in theory the rightful heir to England’s throne. Not to explain this paints an incomplete picture and does a disservice to the characters of both queens.
2. Mary, Queen of Scots has one of the most adventurous, exciting, romantic, crazy, surprising lives in history. You don’t even have to “sex it up” for the movies. It’s already an off-the-rails thrill ride. But this movie leaves out so much of the most interesting material. (Why doesn’t it show us the way she pulls of an escape to England?) And it somehow manages to make the material it leaves in exceedingly dull.
3. I’ll allow Crazy Elizabeth because at least that’s different, but this movie gets something crucially wrong about Mary’s character. As played by Saoirse Ronan, Mary is so abrasive, but the historical Mary was unbelievably charming. People were always falling in love with her, being enchanted by her, risking their lives to help her. She was a figure who inspired romance. Encounters with her stirred unexpected devotion. She won hearts through personal charisma. On paper, a lot of her misadventures make her sound insane, but that’s because propagandists deliberately characterized her as unstable and dangerous. (And also, she was a bit strong-willed and high spirited.) But when you read her own words, she has an irresistible charm, even five hundred years later. I’m on Elizabeth’s side. There’s no question. But when I first read Mary’s own letters, I found myself being charmed by her. I mean, she was often rash and unfortunately out of her depth politically (which the movie shows well), but, nevertheless, she had such charisma.
All of these things together (plus the bizarre mischaracterization of Elizabeth as an addled dingbat which I’m not even going to get into) make this movie so much less than it could be.
As we talked in the car on the way home, my husband observed, “It was almost like the movie wanted to make the angry rhetoric of John Knox look true. The movie makes it look like these two women have all of the vices he talks about and are incapable of ruling.”
It does indeed. This is a huge insult to Elizabeth and an unkind assessment of Mary. Actually, you know what? Elizabeth would probably like this movie. She’d probably have it shown all over Europe and wail, “You see? I always loved my sister queen! I loved her son as my own. As a woman, my greatest longing has been to bear a child! I never meant to sign that warrant! You can see how I loved her! It was all Davison’s fault!” That would be the only thing she didn’t like about the movie. If Elizabeth were directing, we’d get a lengthy scene of her calling back the signed death warrant, and then another post credits scene of her calling and calling into the night, “Davison! Davison! Come back!” while he pointedly ignored her. And then she would have the movie subtitled “What Davison Did.”
I actually do feel sorry for Elizabeth. Mary put her in a terrible position. But if somebody compiled a list ranking one million historical figures from most to least genuine, Elizabeth’s name would appear right at the top of that list because she would have commissioned the list and had a copy sent to everyone in the world.
It is criminally naive to suggest that Elizabeth I was prisoner to the wills of the men who advised her just because she theatrically lamented that she was every time she didn’t want to be held accountable for unpleasant things.
Cate Blanchett’s interpretation of Elizabeth remains my favorite. I enjoyed Robbie’s surprising performance, but it’s disheartening to think that people new to the story will watch the movie and come away with that impression of Elizabeth I.
Honestly, this film seems like somebody decided to tell the story of Mary and Elizabeth using all the misinformation about them. We get Mary’s fantasy of Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s fantasy of Mary. But why?
Overall:
Mary Queen of Scots is a less successful movie than its namesake was a ruler of Scotland. This is not a good film, but elements of it might make a good stage play. (The concept seems kind of half-baked, like there’s some nascent, edgy stage masterpiece lurking in there somewhere.)
Although I really despise the score and have major issues with the characterization of Mary and (especially) Elizabeth, the film does benefit from strong performances by Ronan and Robbie, cool costumes and make-up, a delightful turn by David Tennant as John Knox, and a broadly accurate depiction of some events in Mary’s life.
The film is slow, so I can’t recommend it to the casual movie goer. But if you are interested in (and informed about) the topic, then you’ll want to see this curious retelling. Fans of Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie should find plenty to enjoy, as well.