sarah eve kelly

I absolutely must add my puff to the others with respect to this movie The Golden Age. I’m sure there are only a handful of people who a) have a postgraduate qualification in Elizabethan history and b) deigned to see this film. But among those like me, who have a morbid fascination with seeing this remarkable era ripped sideways by people who think that stabbing and hand-wringing are more interesting than the actual fornication and bloody murder that the age furnished us with, there seems to be a curious consensus that this film is somehow inferior to the first one, Elizabeth, released some ten years ago.

I don’t want to go on record defending this movie; let’s get that out of the way first. I thought that most of it was appalling. I could only sit with my jaw dropping into my popcorn -and not for the usual reasons - when the Queen (who apparently had a loose, waist-length wig and Seven-of-Nine armour created just in case), astride her white charger before her brave troops, hollered ‘MY LOVING PEOPLE - ‘ and then went on to recite something other than the Tilbury speech. I mean, come on, Michael Hirst. That was the easy part! This speech - read it for yourself here - has the multiple advantages of being short, ringing true to our twenty-first-century ears, and being one of the greatest speeches ever given by a commander-in-chief. John Prebble didn’t think he could best it; probably Winston Churchill didn’t think he could best it. But Michael Hirst - the guy who came up with the great idea of having Jonathan Rhys-Meyers yell ‘I’m the King of England!’ at the front of every line - this guy thinks he can best it.

Boy, was he wrong.

Anyway, End of Aside. Back to the rest of it.

As I say, I don’t want to come out on the defensive. My point is this: the only historical drama that The Golden Age could possibly look good next to is Elizabeth. Did anyone who called Elizabeth a ‘clever, intellectual intrigue’ actually see it? It’s not just the inaccuracy and anachronism that bothers me about it. I’ve said this before: The Lion in Winter, which chronicles a fictitious Christmas in 1183 - a Christmas with trees - is my favourite movie in all the world. It was the chaos of Elizabeth that got me, the pointlessness, frankly the shame of slandering real historical figures without the excuse of art. Unlike The Lion in Winter, Elizabeth revealed no great truths and failed even to provide a good story, paling against the cracking good true story that lay beneath Hirst’s hands.

The Golden Age, on the other hand, got a few mise-en-scene matters right. What the reviewers called ‘over the top’ - the wigs (the loose one with the weird plaits excepted), the gowns - that was the stuff that hit home. That Cate Blanchett is now meant to be playing an old woman (Elizabeth turned 55 in 1588, a number that is skirted in the film) and barely looks 30 to her own 38 can’t, I suppose, be helped. But the effort is there: doffing the wig at the end of the day, examining lines, providing a binary between public and private appearances. The woman is old and lonely; they got that right.

The other bit that reviewers found unbelievable was that a strong character, a queen and a good one, could possibly give vent to crushes or violent fits of jealousy. These characteristics, I say for the benefit of the many-headed, are not mutually exclusive and are, in my estimation, almost predictable as a set. True to form, too: during the remarkable scene in which Elizabeth finds out about Bess and Raleigh’s affair and proceeds to beat Bess up, shrieking ‘My bitches wear my collars’, I wanted to jump for joy. They got that right. Was this jealousy and possessiveness Elizabeth’s only characteristic? No. Was it even a dominant one? No. Did it affect her rule over her court and her people? Not as much as people think (for more, consult my published works, hurrah). Did it co-exist with the voices of her better angels? Yes, by God.

Those are the last of my defences of this more or less full-on piece of garbage. The Elizabeth screenplay backed this one into a corner by eliminating both Lord Burghley and the Earl of Leicester as principal characters - which they were - and an enormous vacuum exists where they should be. The military history is baffling, the battle scenes equally so. They fail completely to catalogue any of the circumstances that made an English victory so amazing; they get the personnel wrong; they suggest that Elizabeth was cooperative in the war effort from the start; and are almost offensive in depicting the Spanish, equating piety with ignorance and coming close to suggesting that they were defeated because they were just really, really stupid. The idea of Elizabeth and Walsingham running the show in tandem like good buddies is laughable, but we won’t fault them for that. Almost everyone seems to love Geoffrey Rush’s Walsingham. Personally I adore the awkward, paranoid guy who actually existed and who Elizabeth almost never liked, but hey. That’s just me.

A lot of movies have been made about the Spanish Armada from the English point of view. At least one of them focuses in, as this one does, on the relationship between Walter Raleigh and Bess Throckmorton (Fire Over England, starring Elizabeth Taylor as Bess). Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to get my few London buddies together and put them in my living room and make them endure the best Armada depiction ever made, the negligibly-budgeted, flourescent-lighted TV special called The Enterprise of England. It’s appalling to look at but wonderfully written and acted, and I’m not puffing myself up by referring to it, because it is classic and just about everyone with an interest in the period has either seen it or heard of it. And it shows - as if her record in the Commons hasn’t done so amply enough - why Glenda Jackson should never have quit acting to become an MP.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Related posts:

1. history for art’s sake
2. measure for measure