Parky at the Pictures (DVD 23/5/2019)

The daughter of James V and Mary of Guise, Mary became Queen of Scotland at six days old. However, she spent much of her childhood in France (hence, she most certainly didn't have a Scottish accent) and became Queen Consort to Francis II in 1559. But she was widowed at 18 after only a year on the throne and returned to her homeland in 1561, which was being governed by her half-brother, James, 1st Earl of Moray. Four years later, she married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley and gave birth to a son, James, in June 1566. After just over a year, however, she was forced to abdicate following her marriage to James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who had supposedly plotted to murder Darnley. Mary fled south, but would come to regret her decision to request asylum from her first cousin once removed, as Elizabeth I feared her enemies would try to exploit Mary's claim to the English crown. 

Mary has been portrayed several times on screen since Mrs Robert L. Thomas took the title role in Alfred Clark's The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), an 18-second trick film produced for Thomas Edison's Kinestoscope viewer that made cinema history by employing a substitution splice to allow the director to replace his star with a dummy for the beheading effect. Among the other notables to take the role are Katharine Hepburn in John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936), Zarah Leander in Carl Froelich's The Heart of a Queen (1940), Samantha Morton in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Camille Rutherford in Thomas Imbach's Mary Queen of Scots (2013), She was also played by Vivian Pickles in the BBC serial, Elizabeth R, and by Vanessa Redgrave in Charles Jarrott's Mary, Queen of Scots (both 1971). In each instance, her rival was played by Glenda Jackson.

Redgrave was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. But, despite the praise for Ronan's work in this latest retelling of a story that never quite happened as the historians insist, it is Robbie who has been drawing the plaudits, as she snared a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress for disguising her Australian twang in this handsome, if worthy adaptation of John Guy's book, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart. 

The action opens in 1587 with Mary (Saoirse Ronan) striding towards the block before flashing back to her arrival at Leith some 26 years earlier. She is welcomed at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh by Moray (James McArdle) and Bothwell (Martin Compston) and entertained with songs by David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova). However, she also sends a message to Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) asking that they can rule in harmony with Mary as her cousin's heir. But, while William Cecil (Guy Pearce) and Lord Thomas Randolph (Adrian Lester) suggest that the Protestant Moray will prevent the Catholic Mary from attempting to overthrow Henry VIII's reformation of the English church, they are aware that Elizabeth needs to marry and conceive an heir before Mary does likewise. Consequently, Cecil tries to tempt the queen with the dashing and malleable Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Joe Alwyn). 

In Edinburgh, Mary's decision to allow her subjects to worship according to their conscience is denigrated by Presbyterian firebrand John Knox (David Tennant). But Randolph is impressed when he comes to Mary's court as an envoy and warns Elizabeth that she is an intelligent woman who can not be browbeaten into submission. While Mary coyly describes the sensation of  sleeping with a man to her maidservants - Mary Seton (Izuka Hoyle), Mary Fleming (Maria Dragus), Mary Beaton (Eileen O'Higgins) and Mary Livingston (Liah O'Prey) - Bess of Hardwick (Gemma Chan) eavesdrops on the pillow talk of Elizabeth and Dudley, as he is persuaded to travel north to provide Mary with a suitor who will keep her in check. 

Eager to secure her claim to the English crown and insulted to be offered an earl in matrimony rather than a prince, Mary rejects Dudley and hopes a meeting with Elizabeth in York will allow them to reach an understanding. But Randolph meets her at the border with news that Elizabeth is busy with the Huguenots (when she actually has the pox) and Mary tells Moray and William Maitland. Lord of Lethington (Ian Hart) that she is in no mood to be toyed with. So, when the 4th Earl of Lennox (Brendan Coyle) returns north with his son, Henry, Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden), Mary decides to marry her cousin (as he has a claim of his own to the English throne) rather than accept Dudley without being acknowledged as Elizabeth's heir. 

While Elizabeth accepts the advice of her all-male council around a table in a cramped chamber, Mary makes her own choice on horseback in the freedom of the glens. But neither woman is really in control of her destiny, as Moray leaves court in fury at Mary has jeopardised peace with England by marrying Darnley (who is Elizabeth's subject not her own), while Cecil (who accepts Elizabeth's insistence that she must rule as a man and not allow love to weaken her position) takes it upon himself to cause civil war in Scotland to prevent an attempted usurpation in England. 

Stung by Darnley's infidelity with Rizzio, Mary leads her troops into action against Moray, whose men have been whipped into a frenzy by the misogynist preaching of Knox. The first engagement of the so-called Chaseabout Raid is shown to be an ambush in which Moray's advance is blocked on a narrow bridge by some Highland cattle and his life is spared by the onlooking Mary, who had earlier chatted with her marching troops to give them courage. She celebrates her triumph by goading Darnley into impregnating her and this news prompts Lennox to seek terms with Moray to control the throne through Darnley and Cecil to plan a second uprising among Protestant Scots. 

Mary's position is not helped by Knox spreading rumours that her child has been fathered out of wedlock by an Italian minstrel and Maitland and Lennox convince Darnley that he has been cuckolded (by a man he has also bedded). He signs the death warrant and joins Bothwell and the other lords in bursting into Mary's bedchamber and stabbing Rizzio to death, with Darnley being forced by Lennox to administer the final blow. He informs Mary that he was coerced into conspiring against her, but Maitland offers to show her his signature in return for a pardon. In this spirit of reconciliation, she welcomes Moray back to court and promises to name her son James in his honour (and that of their father). Moreover, she asks Elizabeth to be the prince's godmother and (being so broody that she has created a bump on her shadow after visiting a newborn foal in her stables) she consents. 

Following shots of both queens sitting with their legs splayed, as Elizabeth produces paper flowers and Mary a child, we see the latter banish Darnley from court under Bothwell's supervision and Elizabeth condemn her privy council for scheming against a woman who has shown such fortitude that they should be grateful to accept her as their monarch in the event of her dying without issue. But the Scots are losing faith in their ruler and, when Bothwell has Darnley murdered at Kirk O'Field and forces Mary to become his bride, Knox brands her a harlot in rabblerousing his congregation into demanding her death. 

Forced to abdicate by Maitland and Moray, Mary seeks Elizabeth's protection and they meet in a wooden hideout in the woods. They are hidden from each other by draped sheets, as Mary offers eternal sisterhood to Elizabeth, who now whitens her face with mercury to hide her pox scars. For a brief moment, they stand before each other as lonely women who have been exposed and exploited by the Machiavellian cruelty of the men who are supposed to be their obedient servants. But, despite needing sanctuary, Mary refuses to consider herself an inferior and, nettled by a remark about her father's treatment of her mother (Anne Boleyn), Elizabeth reminds her that her strengths have become her weaknesses. She guarantees to keep her safe, providing that Mary offers no encouragement to her foes, before a tearful Elizabeth (who has removed her wig to show how vulnerable she is, despite all her efforts to assume a manly nature) leaves Mary to her fate.

As Elizabeth ages in the course of a stately walk along a cloister corridor, she composes an imaginary message to Mary, by way of explanation for her imminent execution. She laments that she has been forced to shed her humanity in order to keep her throne and wishes she had signed the warrant decades earlier to have spared Mary so much torment. But she has seen letters in Mary's hand proving her complicity in the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and, therefore, she has no option but to condemn her. Accompanied by her ladies in waiting (who have not aged a day, either), Mary reveals a bright red dress beneath her cloak and an onlooker scowls at her martyr complex. But she whispers a prayer to James to complete her work by uniting the realms under the Stuarts. 

Despite drawing on a Whitbread Biography prize winner, this often feels less like an historical recreation than an episode of screenwriter Beau Willimon's American version of House of Cards dressed up in Game of Thrones tropes to entice a #MeToo audience into thinking of Mary and Elizabeth as being peace-loving sisters betrayed by bellicose institutional sexism. All of which would be fine if the film wasn't so earnestly dull. There is every bit as much intrigue and skullduggery as there was in, say, Patrice Chéreau's La Reine Margot (1994), which was set in the French court around the same period. But, in making her feature bow after a successful tenure at the Donmar Warehouse, Josie Rourke seems far too intent on stressing socio-political issues that will chime with modern audiences to place enough emphasis on the core drama. Thus, while she persuades us to view the 16th-century cousins in a new light, she fails to convince with either her wider thesis or its presentation. 

With fire in her eyes to match the colour of her tresses, Saoirse Ronan makes a thoroughly modern Mary, in much the same way that Keira Knightley's Colette was more millennial and fin de siècle. She also puts a good deal of effort into the anachronistic Scottish accent, as if she was trying to channel her inner Nicola Sturgeon. But she never feels particularly regal or dynastic, with the result her struggle winds up having more to do with gender than power. By contrast, Margot Robbie more effectively combines human flaw and divine right to create an Elizabeth who sees the bigger picture and is a skilled political operator regardless of her sex rather than an impulsive victim, who is too often led by her heart rather than her head. 

No one else in the cast gets much of a look in, however, as the courtiers in London and Edinburgh are merely ciphers whose purpose is to be bewhiskered, boorish and bigoted. Guy Pearce's Cecil (who sounds curiously like David Attenborough) and Ian Hart's Maitland are ruthless in their cunning and conniving, but Willimon places much of the blame for Mary's woes on David Tennant's Knox, who is depicted as a misogynist religious crank who wouldn't be out of place in any 21st-century fundamentalist organisation. 

The decision to play up David Rizzio's homosexuality also feels like a contrived attempt to reel in potential LGBTQ+ punters, while the colour blind casting reinforces the idea that inclusivity matters more to the film-makers than authenticity. Once again, this would be completely fine if the picture wasn't so ponderous or so obsessed with palaces rather than people. Apart from a few shots of marching troops and over-excited kirk-goers, the hoi-polloi are an irrelevance. Yet more fuss has been made of the fleeting sight of some menstrual blood than the absence of life outside the confines of the courts or the gauche simplification of the complex impact of the Reformation on either side of the border.

Opening with Mary sweeping across the Old Schools Quad at the Bodleian Library and making evocative use of the Divinity School for Elizabeth's privy council chamber, Rourke and production designer James Merifield capture the period feel with the scenes set in Blackness Castle, Oxroad Bay, Hardwick Hall, Haddon Hall Manor and Gloucester Cathedral. Cinematographer John Mathieson's atmospheric lighting is equally estimable. But Max Richter's score is often over-emphatic, while Chris Dickens's editing fails to generate sufficient tension by cutting across the geographical divide separating the conflicted queens. Evidently keen to show she can operate outside the proscenium, Rourke directs thoughtfully. But the leads are hamstrung by a combination of awkward tonal shifts and Willimon's florid dialogue. Consequently, while it strives hard to redraft the popular conception of its heroine, this is so preoccupied with contemporary topics that it takes its eyes off the past.

Since featuring in Victor Hugo's 1869 novel, The Man Who Laughs, Queen Anne has often been presented in the most unflattering light. Anna Kallina and Josephine Crowell respectively played her in a pair of silent adaptations of Hugo's Romantic grotesquerie, Julius Herzka's The Grinning Face (1921) and Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs (1928), while Margaret Tyzack and Elizabeth Spriggs conveyed something of her melancholic character in David Giles's The First Churchills (1969) and Laura Lamson's Wren: The Man Who Built Britain (2004). 

Much of the attention, however, has fallen on Anne's relationship with Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough. The first to latch on to this peculiar dependency was the French playwright, Eugène Scribe, whose 1840 stage work, Le Verre d'eau, has frequently been revisited on the screen since Mady Christians and Lucie Höflich played the monarch and her manipulator in Ludwig Berger's UFA silent, Ein Glas Wasser (1921), which was one of the many kostümfilme that enhanced the reputation of Weimar cinema. Liselotte Pulver and Hilde Krahl took the roles in Helmut Käutner's 1961 musical version, Das Glas Wasser, while Gunnel Lindblom and Ulla Sjöblom were paired in Gustaf Molander's 1960 Swedish television take, Ett Glas vatten. 

Elsewhere, a Hungarian channel teamed Judit Halász and Éva Ruttkai in Judit Halász's Saak-matt (1977), while Soviet viewers were treated to Tatyana Eremeeva  and Yelena Gogoleva and Natalya Belokhvostikova and Alla Demidova facing off in 1957 and 1979 small-screen interpretations of Stakan vody that were respectively directed by Aleksandr Usoltsev-Garf and M. Filimonova and Yuli Karasik. With the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2015 production of Helen Edmundson's play, Queen Anne, also being added to the mix, it's clear that the friendship between Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman (as Anne and Sarah liked to call themselves) has received considerable dramatic attention down the years. 

Judging by the slew of reviews and articles, however, many appear to be labouring under the impression that Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, the screenwriters of Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, have exposed a secret history of the last Stuart ruler of these islands. While this is clearly not the case, they have turned Davis's five-part Radio Four drama into a woundingly witty epigrammatic comedy, which merits comparison with such rapier romps as Patrice Leconte's Ridicule (1996), which was set in the 1780s at the Versailles of Louis XVI. 

Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) and Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) have been friends since childhood. In return for her unquestioning companionship, however, Sarah has amassed a number of key positions at court that enable her to control access to the crown. Consequently, Tory leader Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (Nicholas Hoult), has to plead for an audience while his powdered and bewigged peers are wagering on a duck race. He is appalled that Anne has conferred a palace upon Sarah's spouse, John, Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss) in gratitude for his victories over Louis XIV. But his protests are met with braying derision by his Whig counterpart, Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin (James Smith).

Arriving at court having landed in the mud after falling out of her carriage, Sarah's impecunious cousin, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), asks for employment because her father has accrued ruinous debts. Initially, Abigail is the butt of cruel jokes in the kitchens. But, having been called to minister to the queen during an attack of gout, Abigail applies a herbal poultice that soothes the sores on Anne's legs and Sarah has her moved into her own room and spared her more demeaning chores. Indeed, Abigail quickly becomes a useful aide, as Sarah flits between magnificent rooms doling out favours to those in her good books and browbeats Anne into pursuing policies that suit her Whig whims. 

Abigail proves a ready student, however, and not only realises that she has caught the eye of the dashing Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn), but she also makes sure that Anne knows that she applied the relieving ointment. Moreover, she acquires the invaluable skill of being in the right place at the right time. Thus, she is scouting the bookshelves in an upper gallery in the queen's rooms when Sarah seduces Anne in a bid to atone to offending her for dancing ostentatiously during a soirée. She also forgives Harley for pushing her down an incline during a nocturnal stroll in the garden to entertain his proposal to use her growing influence with the queen to lobby against the continuation of the expensive War of the Spanish Succession. 

Aware of her debt to Sarah, Abigail mentions his entreaty while they are out shooting and Sarah fires an unloaded pistol to remind her cousin where the  power in their relationship lies. Such is her preoccupation with orchestrating events in parliament and at court, however, that Sarah neglects the queen, whose needy mood swings pitch her into Abigail's orbit. Yet, while she recognises the benefits of having the queen's ear, she seems genuinely moved by Anne's revelation that she has named each of her 17 pet rabbits after the children she had lost with her husband, Prince George of Denmark. However, her attempt to boost the ruler's spirits with the music of a juvenile chamber orchestra backfires and Anne grabs a baby off one of her female courtiers in order to cradle it. 

While Abigail's motives for her kindliness towards the queen are left ambiguous, Harley's determination to use her for his own ends prompt him to persuade Masham to make a play for her. He also pounces upon Sarah's dwindling fortunes to prevent Anne from replenishing the war coffers by doubling a land tax that would hit the gentry hard. Consequently, when she is splattered by the blood of a bird that Abigail bags during their next shooting session, Sarah senses a shift in the balance of power from which she might not be able to recover. Her suspicions are confirmed when she finds Abigail naked in Anne's bed and discovers that she has been appointed a maid of the bedchamber after she has dismissed her for insubordination. 

The glare with which Abigail regards her erstwhile benefactress before stepping into Anne's carriage reveals the extent to which she has honed her own machinatory skills. But Sarah has too much to lose to relinquish her grip and exploits a shared chocolate bath with the queen to remind her of their shared childhood antics and Abigail has to resort to poisoned tea to buy some time. However, the indisposed Sarah is dragged into the woods by her horse and is detained at a brothel while she recovers, enabling Abigail to forge an alliance with Harley (while he is pelting a naked fellow party member with pomegranates) and a marriage of convenience with Masham, who is treated to a decidedly unromantic wedding night. Excited by the prospect of a clandestine wedding, Anne blesses the union and gives the newlyweds a suite at Kensington Palace.

When Sarah fails to return, however, and search parties find no trace of her, Abigail becomes concerned that she has gone too far. However, Godolphin comes to Sarah's rescue and she returns to court with a badly scarred left cheek. She slaps Abigail's face and vows to destroy her by having her banished. But Anne is frightened by her appearance and refuses to buckle when Sarah threatens to send letters discussing their intimacy to the newspapers. Indeed, she demands the return of her fallen favourite's pass-key and holds firm when Sarah speaks to her from the secret passage linking their apartments, even though she assures her that she has only ever had her best interests at heart and has always told her the truth rather than buttering her with false flattery. 

Anne watches from her window as Sarah's coach departs from the darkened courtyard and, soon afterwards, she informs parliament that Harley will replace Godolphin as her prime minister with instructions to sue for peace with France. The deposed statesman tries to plead Sarah's cause and suggests that she writes to the queen. But, even after she finally finds the right words, Sarah has her letter intercepted by Abigail, who wipes away a tear after tossing the parchment on the fire and starts plotting to have Anne believe that the Churchills have been siphoning off war funds to defraud her. 

Deciding that discretion is the better part of valour, Lady Marlborough suggests a trip abroad to her newly returned husband, while Abigail (who toys with the idea of crushing one of the royal pets with her shoe) also learns her place when a wildly distracted Anne orders her to rub her legs and the films end on their superimposed faces fading into a blurred image of hopping rabbits.

Despite smudging the timeline and taking the odd factual liberty, this is a reasonably reliable recreation of the battle for the heart and mind of Queen Anne between cousins adopting markedly different approaches to her conquest. Sufficiently confident in her long-established hegemony to admonish the monarch for being made up like a badger to greet the Russian ambassador, Sarah Churchill commits the kind of strategic error that would never have been made by her husband of underestimating her adversary. Failing to appreciate how social and sexual humiliation had hardened Abigail Hill, Sarah mistakes her meekness for weakness and pays the penalty for her complacency. However, Abigail also comes to recognise the difficulty of consistently pleasing a fickle mistress who is nowhere near as bovinely foolish as she sometimes appears. 

Taking their cues from Davis and McNamara's icily urbane script (complete with some unnecessarily anachronistic cursing), Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and Olivia Colman not only excel in Sandy Powell's sublime costumes, but they also have the intelligence and generosity to realise that the picture will only succeed if they play off against each other rather than against each other. Lanthimos has acknowledged a debt to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950), but Bette Davis made little effort to hide the fact that she was trying to act Anne Baxter off the screen. Instead, Weisz and Stone challenge each other to up their game, as they compete to control the over-indulged, self-pitying and pitiably vulnerable Colman, who laps up the attention that goes some way to alleviating the agony of her dynastic deficiencies and physical deterioration. 

Rouged and decadently foppish, even as they pursue the gravest matters of state, the Whigs and Tories are unquestionably held up for comparison with both the self-serving rabbles currently occupying the front benches in the Commons and the sycophants and incompetents trying to appease the equally mercurial Donald Trump. But, as he demonstrated with Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Lanthimos is more interested in scrutinising human nature than surveying the contemporary scene. Thus, this neo-Restoration comedy has much tonally and visually in common with Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) and Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and Nightwatching (2007). 

Production designer Fiona Crombie makes sumptuous use of the houses at Hatfield and Ashridge in Hertfordshire, as well as Knole in Kent, while the Bodleian Library once again does a sterling job standing in for the Houses of Parliament. However, cinematographer Robbie Ryan employs oblique angles and distorting fish-eye lenses to impose an aura of dislocatory claustrophobia that makes Anne's court at once imposing and inane. This unsettling atmosphere is reinforced by the soundtrack shifts between classical pieces by Handel, JS and FW Bach, Vivaldi, Purcell, Schumann and Schubert, as well as by more recent composers like Olivier Messiaen, Luc Ferrari, Anna Meredith and Elton John, who provides harpsichord accompaniment over the closing credits with `Skyline Pigeon' from the 1968 Empty Sky album.

Those who find Lanthimos to be a bit cold and calculating may still be unconvinced. But there is much to admire in this baroque blend of period formality and satirical severity and it felt like an injustice that Colman should be the only member of the actorly triumvirate to convert her Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, while Stone missed out on any of the major gongs after Weisz received a consolation BAFTA. It would also be intriguing to sit in on a Q&A session with the director and his principals after an outdoor screening on a balmy summer night at Blenheim. Perhaps they could also show a couple of the earlier Sarah-Anne showdowns? The long summer nights are coming, after all.