Queen size

Elizabeth crowns Cate Blanchett a star

by Alicia Potter

ELIZABETH. Directed by Shekhar Kapur. Written by Michael Hirst. With Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Fiennes, and Richard Attenborough. A Gramercy Pictures release. At the Avon and Jane Pickens.

"Your undoubted queen!" proclaims a magistrate as he sets a gleaming crown on Cate Blanchett's apricot-colored head. From that moment on, there isn't any question that Blanchett, with her noble cheekbones and imperious gaze, rules as the legendary 16th-century British monarch in Shekhar Kapur's resplendent Elizabeth.

It's a star-making performance that's likely to put the Australian-born actress, last seen in 1997's Oscar and Lucinda, in the Academy Award square-off. It also places her in some formidable company, namely that of Dame Flora Robson, Bette Davis, and Glenda Jackson, all of whom put their best farthingales forward as the tormented yet kittenish queen. But unlike Davis, who affected a risible, load-in-her-pantalettes walk for 1955's The Virgin Queen, Blanchett never curtsies to caricature. Her interpretation is complex, restrained, warmly sensual. And though the film is decidedly erotic for a biography of a Virgin Queen -- many historians insist she lived up to the moniker -- this Elizabeth gets turned on not just by her paramour but by her power, too.

The film opens in 1554, several years before Elizabeth's accession (she ruled from 1558 to 1603), to stoke the violent drama of her early reign. Recalling the unmerciful brutality of Kapur's 1994 Bandit Queen, Elizabeth at once tests stomachs with the spectacle of three screaming Protestants being burned at the stake. Such is the scourge of Catholic Queen Mary (Kathy Burke), Elizabeth's dithering shrew of a half-sister, who orders the execution of hundreds of "heretics," including Protestant Elizabeth. But soon the tumor-addled Mary dies, and 25-year-old Elizabeth is coronated amid much pomp. She quickly learns that being queen isn't all velvet and volta dances: France, Scotland, and Spain threaten England. And within her courts, a papal plot to overthrow her cooks.

Kapur interprets these themes of illusion, imprisonment, and subterfuge in rich, rhapsodic imagery. Curtains -- yards and yards of 'em -- emerge as the dominant leitmotif: airy drapes obscure Elizabeth's boudoir romps with dapper Lord Dudley (Joseph Fiennes, Ralph's brother); shifty characters skulk into rooms from behind heavy tapestries; and when an attempt is made on the monarch's life, she's pinned beneath a sheath of netting. Likewise, the Indian director contrasts the verdant, diorama-like settings of Elizabeth's youth with the Stygian dankness of the palace, where, often, Blanchett's luminosity seems to be the only light.

Although evocative, Kapur's touch isn't exactly gentle. He cudgels home the impact of Catholic zealotry with plenty of God-is-watching aerial shots, and in one particularly overwrought instance he casts Elizabeth in a cross-shaped spotlight as Queen Mary considers offing her head. Kapur also continues to ply a predilection for artful grotesquerie: limbless corpses litter a battlefield, and at one point a bishop flagellates himself, his shirt a rag of bloody tatters.

Such slickness elevates style over sentiment, further softening the emotional subtlety of Michael Hirst's script. Among the members of Elizabeth's court, who include Richard Attenborough as chief adviser Sir William Cecil and Christopher Eccleston (Jude) as the hawkish Duke of Norfolk, only Geoffrey Rush (Shine) as Lord Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's Machiavellian master of spies, seethes with can't-look-away intensity. Similarly, the plot against the queen -- a conflation of several real-life events -- is convoluted, and its machinators blur into a pantalooned posse of run-of-the-mill bad guys.

Blanchett's performance, too, isn't so much moving as intriguing. Kapur keeps this tale from turning into a dusty old history lesson by taking a cue from England's current rulers -- the Spice Girls. The film wields a feisty, wholly anachronistic girl-power edge. In fact, this Elizabeth is just your average working gal, Ally McBeal in brocade instead of Banana Republic. Everyone wants to marry her off, she's anxious about her job (in one of the film's few humorous moments, she practices a speech to the Catholic bishops), and she's learning that her boyfriend just may be a cad. She even roars, "I am not afraid of anything!" and "I am no man's Elizabeth!"

You goeth, girl. In the end, Kapur's crown jewel is a tale of twin transformations, that of Elizabeth into one of history's most enigmatic and powerful women, and that of Blanchett into, well, a bona fide screen queen.

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Not like a virgin

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