BEFORE: From the early 1700's I'm jumping back to the 1560's, to the time of Queen Elizabeth I, following the reign of Henry VIII. I'm still staying in the same family, though I always find that keeping track of British succession is a tricky thing for me. I can never memorize the order of the various kings and queens, I always have to look it up. But here goes: Mary, Queen of Scots, was the mother of King James I (aka James VI of Scotland), then James was the father of King Charles I, and Charles was the father of James II, (aka James VII of Scotland), and James II was the father of Mary II (of William and Mary fame). When Mary II died, her sister became queen, and that was Queen Anne. So Mary from tonight's film is the great-great-grandmother of Queen Anne, from yesterday's film. Is that right? They're four generations apart, in just about 150 years, but people back then had children earlier (especially royalty) and tended to not live as long (again, especially royalty).
I got really lucky here, because there was one actor who appeared in BOTH 2018 films about British queens (and I don't mean "Bohemian Rhapsody") so Joe Alwyn carries over from "The Favourite".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mary, Queen of Scots" (1971) (Movie #1,114)
THE PLOT: Mary Stuart's attempt to overthrow her cousin Elizabeth I, Queen of England, finds her condemned to years of imprisonment before facing execution.
AFTER: You apparently can't discuss Mary, Queen of Scots without Queen Elizabeth I being noted in the same conversation - Mary's grandmother was Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, who was the sister of King Henry VIII, so therefore Mary and Elizabeth were cousins - though they often call each other "sisters" in this film, that's apparently just a reference to how close they felt, at least at one time. Mary was technically Queen of Scotland when she was just six days old, and her grand-uncle Henry VIII wanted her to marry his son Edward (that would also be her cousin) when she turned 10. But this idea (the treaty of Greenwich) was ultimately rejected, and she instead went to France to marry the son of a different King Henry, Henry II of France.
Things got complicated when Mary (of William & Mary) died in 1558, and then Henry II of France died in 1559. The English throne passed to Elizabeth I (Mary I's sister) and the French throne passed to Francis (husband of Mary, Queen of Scots). Everything looked like it was going to work out - for about 5 seconds. Francis II of France died in 1560, and Mary, Queen of Scots returned to Scotland. Now, she was Catholic, which caused many problems in Protestant Scotland, while Queen Elizabeth was Anglican, which caused some problems in England because people were still angry over Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church. (From a distance, all these years later, the solution seems obvious - Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots should just switch thrones - only it doesn't work that way.)
Since Elizabeth I had romance troubles of her own - the so-called "Virgin Queen", who was anything but, however she didn't seem able to have a child, so there was much concern about what would happen to the throne, if anything should happen to her. (Elizabeth never married, and apparently adoption wasn't a viable work-around, either.) So Mary QOS saw an opportunity, since if you go back through the lineage, some argued that she should have been next in line for the English throne, since she was the oldest other surviving legitimate descendant of Henry VII. (Is that right? Or am I mixing up my Henrys again?) So she tried to broker a deal, if Elizabeth didn't have any children, which seemed to be a safe bet, then the throne should go to Mary QOS upon Elizabeth's death.
That seems simple enough - but again, now we've got the whole Catholic/Protestant thing again, because the believers of each religion were convinced that theirs was the "one true religion", and the other one was shite. So no matter who took over the throne, there was going to be somebody unhappy about it, it seems. Elizabeth sent two suitors to Scotland, Dudley and Darnley. Robert Dudley was supposedly also Elizabeth's lover, and if Mary had chosen to marry him, that would have put an English nobleman into a position where he could one day become king, or consort at least. Same goes for Henry Darnley, but it seems that Mary preferred Darnley over Dudley - he must have been more charming, or at least he wasn't always brooding over missing Queen Elizabeth.
But choosing Darnley over Dudley sets off a constitutional crisis in England, and a civil War in Scotland. Elizabeth I is advised to not approve of the marriage, which could strengthen Mary QOS's claim to the crown. And many Scottish nobles didn't approve of an Englishman coming to town and marrying the Queen, because why couldn't she find a suitable husband among the Scots?
On the diversity front, this movie employed color-blind casting - this was probably well-intentioned, it's a practice that allegedly carries over from British theater conventions. And, generally speaking, I would support this, but there is a downside, because it creates a film that then becomes historically inaccurate. There are at least four people "of color" in key roles in this film, but that probably wasn't the case back in the 1560's, now, was it? I doubt there were four minority people of note in all of Great Britain at the time, and most likely someone with dark skin, like a Moor, wouldn't be a nobleman named "Lord Randolph". It sticks out as a form of revisionist history. You can't just impose the wide tapestry of skin colors that right-thinking people are used to seeing today on the culture of the past, it doesn't work. People were even more racist then than they are now, or their cultures didn't have any minority representation at all, and to sweep all that under the carpet and pretend it didn't exist seems like a strange move.
It also creates a bit of a problem with there is one character who gets taken down by an angry mob of Scots, Julius Caesar-style, when they want to accuse someone of improper relations with the queen. David Rizzio takes the fall, and though his name sounds Italian, he's played by an actor with a Hispanic name. The mob is wrong, at least about which member of the ruling couple Rizzio slept with (more on that in a sec) but this way, it's unclear if the mob is trying to kill him because of some trumped-up charge of adultery, or because he's a minority. This just plain looks wrong, with a bunch of white people stabbing a brown person, and the intended message is overshadowed by the race card this way.
Now, as with yesterday's film "The Favourite", there seems to be a bit of revisionist history employed here, with regard to homosexuality. I'm not saying it didn't exist back then, because it most likely did, but back then it was still regarded as a major (mortal) sin. This film suggests that a major character's same-sex preference is treated with a shrug, more or less, like "Eh, what can you do about it?" My guess is that people either didn't want to discuss this out loud, or if they did, they'd be likely to yell "Sodomite!" and then burn that person at the stake. Well, jeez, the guy's married to the queen, so I guess that's really her problem at the end of the day - it's not like this is going to affect her ability to produce an heir, or anything like that.
But this leads to some obvious questions, like if Henry Darnley preferred sleeping with men, why did he pursue the queen in the first place? Was it out of some family obligation, or was he intent on deceiving her from the start? Maybe he got married with good intentions, then realized his mistake, either because they were incompatible or because later on he met the right guy - who's to say? But finding this out later lends a whole different interpretation to his first sex scene with Queen Mary - it sort of doesn't make sense, but then again, it sort of does. Maybe he just swung both ways, and even after getting married, he found he couldn't stay faithful to one type of lover - if that's the case, trying to deny his feelings for men and just sleep with one woman could have the opposite effect. You can only bottle up those feelings for so long.
Queen Mary seemed very accepting of gay people, here she treated Rizzio as if he were one of her lady servants, they got to play dress-up together and (one assumes) gossip about the court and drink white wine together. Did you SEE what the Countess was wearing in court today? Again, this seems like a modern convention being forced on a past century, for the queen to have a GBF. And her acceptance probably went right out the window when she caught her bestie sleeping with her husband, right? These were very strongly religous people, after all. OK, maybe Mary was a Protestant, and they tend to be a little more accepting of gay people than Catholics are, but that's by TODAY'S standards, not those of the 1500's.
I noticed here the same problem I had with the 1971 film of (nearly) the same name - Mary was imprisoned for YEARS, a couple decades even, but the audience doesn't feel the weight of the passage of time during that imprisonment if the film just skips over it and goes right to the execution. How about a montage of her in a jail cell, day after day, you know, to show us what really took place?
But as I said before, after Queen Elizabeth, Mary's son James became King, and that was the end of all the conflict in the U.K. and any disputes over who should rule. Yeah, right.
Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Hanna"), Margot Robbie (last heard in "Peter Rabbit"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), David Tennant (last heard in "The Pirates! Band of Misfits"), Jack Lowden (last seen in "Pan"), Gemma Chan (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Martin Compston, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Brendan Coyle (last seen in "Tomorrow Never Dies"), Ian Hart (last seen in "The End of the Affair"), Adrian Lester (last seen in "Jimi: All Is By My Side"), James McArdle (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens"), Maria-Victoria Dragus, Eileen O'Higgins, Isuka Hoyle, Liah O'Prey, Alex Beckett, Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Andrew Rothney.
RATING: 6 out of 10 smallpox scars
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