Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Avoiding the obvious sequel title (Helen Mirren’s already given us Elizabeth II), it feels like a trip too far into royalty, pomp and circumstance from Shekhar Kapur, who dazzled us on a far smaller budget with Bandit Queen before he got his hooks into Liz I. History is treated lightly: Raleigh famously brought back pepper, tobacco and gold as every schoolchild knows, but the spud seems to have been passed over here. The secret marriage to Bess was real and the cloak/puddle sequence is present and correct, but no one is playing bowls when the Armada hoves into view. Most improbably, Liz rousing the troops with flowing hair on horseback, more Boadicea or Joan of Arc, seems to belong in a whole different kind of film. This one falls between two stools: you can have fun with history and the audience’s bits of knowledge ?la A Knight’s Tale or Shakespeare in Love; or you can take it seriously and aim for accuracy. This does neither and rather subverts the best intentions of Blanchett, Samantha Morton and Geoffrey Rush (Clive Owen always seems a bit more Clive Owen in a beard than Walt).
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