‘The Favourite’ a reminder that history is subtler than Hollywood politics

It takes about ten minutes to realize that animals figure in Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest project. Insectival ambitions and lusts drive the men and women in the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). To curry favor is to survive. Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough has no intention of losing the game. The confidant and occasional bed mate of the queen, Sarah watches her poor relative Abigail Hill ascend from scullery maid to the queen’s unofficial physician because she knows a little something about healing herbs.

How this triad sorts itself is The Favorite‘s dilemma, a period film whose anachronisms disrupt the normal audience responses to that most respectable and often mummified of subgenres. One of those anachronisms is the casting: Rachel Weisz as Churchill and Emma Stone as Abigail would not have been anyone’s first choices even during the height of the Merchant Ivory era and despite Weisz’s own period pedigree. But Weisz is a waspish delight serving as unofficial prime minister. Her first words of affection to her queen: “You look like a badger. Do you really think you can handle the Russian delegation looking like that? Go back to your room.”

The use of fish-eye lenses and dissonant montages, familiar to fans of The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, further adds to the sense of unreality, as if Alexander Pope had written a ten thousand line mock heroic poem in heroic couplets called “The Favourite” without the compensatory elegance (Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara relishes modern lingo like “It’s okay,” another distancing effect). The picture even begins in a Popean manner with Anne doting on the seventeen rabbits symbolizing the children she’s lost and expressing an interest in — shades of Lanthimos’ most famous picture — a lobster race. On occasion Lanthimos overreaches: one such montage earlier in the picture establishes Anne’s gout by showing the hasty application of bandages while Olivier Messiaen, Luc Ferrari and Anna Meredith’s modern score surges to ten. It’s thanks to her illness that Anne is malleable, whether Churchill whispers in her ear or Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), head of the Parliamentary opposition, is trying to woo, in every sense, Abigail into acting as spy. The stakes are high yet remote: a war with France that Churchill endorses, including the tax increases to support it (perhaps she should’ve slept with George W. Bush).

By focusing on the sexual politics of Anne’s court, Lanthimos risks filming a bitch fest, to which The Favourite at times devolves. The brio of the performers has its disadvantages too; Davis and McNamara offer the kind of rat-tat-tat banter that actors praise in promotional interviews for not getting enough of, such as the following exchange between Harley and Abigail: “Are you going to seduce me or rape me?” “I’m a gentleman.” “Rape then.” In this hothouse, Weisz as Churchill scores the most recognizable triumph, a reveling in wickedness that Lanthimos, with his usual skill, manipulates for humanizing effects; she’s a woman, not a desexualized beast. In a similar manner Colman, framed in moments to resemble Charles Laughton, plays Anne as a monarch whose peccadilloes are necessities; without them she would harden into a marble statue.

There’s more to The Favourite, a film in which the men step on rakes in their efforts to keep up with the women in power. Not helping matters is, as a critic pointed out, how awful the first decade of the eighteenth century was for men’s fashion: the nadir of post-Restoration fashion when the makeup looked like frosting. Serves’em right. So much of our received wisdom about Elizabeth, Mary II, and Victoria comes from novels and movies stressing their prudery and humorlessness; after decades of costume dramas in which women have served as objects, The Favourite reminds audiences that history is subtler than Hollywood gender politics.

GRADE: B+