If ever a movie needed Gary Oldman, it's Elizabeth: The Golden Age. That may sound like a random observation, but the thought kept creeping into my head as I watched Shekhar Kapur's follow-up to the 1997 hit Elizabeth, which breathed fresh life into the travails of the young Virgin Queen and made Cate Blanchett into an international superstar. Some critics trashed the original for being history writ as florid soap opera — without acknowledging that sometimes, florid soap opera can go a long way. For their encore, which focuses largely on Elizabeth's dealings with a hostile Spain and her rumored romance with rascally, America-exploring captain Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), Kapur and co notch it up even further. Elizabeth: The Golden Age not only contains outsize emotions, it contains outsize images as well. It wants to beat you into submission with its fevered grandiosity. That's where Mr. Oldman comes in.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age feels like two films warring against each other. While the pirouetting camera, expressionistic lighting and blaring music suggest a film of operatic scale and ambition, the cast is peopled largely with shrinking violets. What is the restrained Owen doing here as the love interest? Or, for that matter, mousy Samantha Morton as Elizabeth's rival Mary? The only one who seems to get it is Blanchett herself, who succeeds in mixing regal intensity with explosive passion and commands the screen whenever she's on it — which is, luckily, often. But the damage is done: "subdued" can't be on this menu, and Owen comes perilously close to bringing the whole enterprise down. Imagine Bill Murray deadpanning his way through a performance of Don Giovanni and you might get the idea.
That's probably not the only problem viewers will have with the film. As is to be expected, it also makes mincemeat of its history, casting the sixteenth-century conflict between Spain and England as a current-events-friendly struggle between the ragtag forces of freedom (led personally by a brave Queen of England) and the armies of religious intolerance (led by a snivelingly pious and cowardly King of Spain). I'm as glad as the next guy that the Spanish Inquisition didn't get its oily hands on England, but this historical reduction smacks of cold opportunism — much like 300 tried to imagine that the repressive Spartans were saving Western liberal democracy by stopping a million-man army of Persian orcs. The question is not whether it's okay to rewrite history in a big-budget entertainment. It's just how stupid you think your audience is. And not even Gary Oldman could help with that one. — Bilge Ebiri
