Josie Rourke (2018)
‘In my end is my beginning’ – fair enough that Mary Queen of Scots both opens and closes with the title character’s execution. Just before the axe falls, she utters the famous words of the motto embroidered on her ‘cloth of estate’ during her imprisonment in England. The main action of Josie Rourke’s film starts in 1561, when the recently widowed Mary (Saiorse Ronan) returns from France to Scotland. It concludes with events leading up to her death in 1587. Is Rourke’s film, with a screenplay by Beau Willimon (based on John Guy’s book Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart) historically accurate? I don’t know but wouldn’t put money on it. How comprehensible is the narrative if you don’t already have a detailed grasp of the events being described? Not very: I kept thinking I should have prepared by refreshing my memory of the 1971 film of the same name, when it was on television the other week.
It’s become par for the course for an historical drama to raise-issues-that-are-no-less-relevant-today and Josie Rourke, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse and whose first cinema feature this is, evidently means to reinvigorate the Tudor-Stuart costume drama accordingly. The script gives girl power and female solidarity their due, while suggesting their limits. ‘Ruling side by side,’ Mary writes to her cousin Queen Elizabeth (Margot Robbie), ‘we must do so in harmony – not by a treaty drafted by men lesser than ourselves’. Later, Mary tells her loyal French lady-in-waiting that, ‘A queen has no sisters – she has only her country’. The sexual ambiguity of Mary’s confidant David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz- Córdova) isn’t such a novelty; as I recall, a gay relationship between him and Lord Darnley was implied even in the 1971 version of the story. More startling is the sexual violence between Mary and Darnley (Jack Lowden) in the royal bedchamber, the heroine giving as good as she gets.
Rourke has a lead actress and others in the cast capable of modernising the material in a substantial way but her revamp is half-hearted. Mary Queen of Scots is, in several respects, royal history movie boilerplate. There are God’s-eye-view shots of glorious landscape, full-frontal photographs of castles and palaces that look destined for a tourist’s British heritage holiday album. There are many sideways glances on the part of courtiers – in Elizabeth’s court, at any rate: it’s often harder to make out faces in the prevailing gloomy interiors north of the border. There are lines that clunk information across and Max Richter’s music swells regally. It may be intrinsically no less good than Hans Zimmer’s main theme for The Crown but the way it’s used makes all the difference. Zimmer’s trademark pomposity renders The Crown’s introductory music all the more effective, reinforcing the disjunction between the supposedly august tradition of British monarchy and its operation in the second half of the twentieth century. In spite of some of the novelties on screen, the Mary Queen of Scots soundtrack seems meant to impress without irony.
The screenplay’s structure of alternating scenes in Scotland and England doesn’t do much for dramatic momentum. The two principals meet just once and secretly, after Mary abdicates the Scottish throne and flees south. Elizabeth sets up this encounter, which quickly turns into a sententious spat. She stomps away from the meeting so emphatically that you expect her to deliver a sarcastic anachronism in the manner of The Favourite (‘That went well …’), though she doesn’t. Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, with the help of the hair and make-up team, are both remarkable to look at. Ronan, as usual, engages keenly with the character she’s playing; on this occasion, that leaves the viewer respecting the performer’s integrity but isn’t enough for us to believe in most of what Mary has to say and do. Robbie’s emotionally brittle Elizabeth oddly suggests the heart and stomach, rather than the body, of a weak, feeble woman: I wasn’t sure if this subversive interpretation was intentional.
Robbie, who doesn’t have Ronan’s facility with accents, speaks her lines so carefully it’s as if her main objective is not to give away that she’s Australian. Her compatriot Guy Pearce does something similar, and to ridiculous effect, as Elizabeth’s advisor William Cecil. At one point, the Queen dismisses advice from her favourite Robert Dudley on the grounds that ‘that’s Cecil talking’. She may well be right but it’s still a relief that Cecil’s not actually talking: Joe Alwyn’s Dudley speaks naturally and well. Jack Lowden, quite outstanding in the television drama The Long Song over Christmas, again impresses, at least in the early stages: his nuanced courtship scenes with Saoirse Ronan provide the better moments in Mary Queen of Scots. It’s not Lowden’s fault that Lord Darnley’s later behaviour is so increasingly bizarre that the character comes to seem absurd. The ‘lesser’ men include some other good actors, including James McArdle and Martin Compston, though the latter, as Bothwell, is submerged in his beard. The casting of David Tennant, however, works well. When he plays relatively well-adjusted men, Tennant’s eyes and face can tend to be overly animated. There’s no danger of that happening in the role of the Protestant zealot John Knox, inveighing repeatedly against the ‘harlot’ Catholic Mary.
23 January 2019
