Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Historians might demand a little more history from "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap. Having ascended the throne at the close of 1998's "Elizabeth," Cate Blanchett's Virgin Queen is ensconced in leadership and wigs. The year is 1585, more than two decades after her coronation, and she's determined to protect from invasion both her English kingdom and her purity. But it won't be easy. Spain angles for a holy war. And Clive Owen wants, well, what any seafaring guy just back from discovering the New World wants: more undiscovered territory.
He plays Walter Raleigh, the peculiarly tanned explorer with the bedroom eyes who wins Elizabeth's attention after he chivalrously throws his rag over a puddle. Until this moment, there's no urgent reason for this movie to exist. But then the screenwriters, William Nicholson and Michael Hirst, and the director, Shekhar Kapur, come clean. To hell with the first movie's thoughtful consideration of a young woman's new political power or that a good second film would show how well she's been marinated in authority over the past 23 years: Let's rip some bodices. Or let's talk about it, anyway.
To atone for any lustful urges, we get a patina of political intrigue. The movie makes dutiful overtures to the cabals and shadowy maneuvering abroad. Spain's King Philip II (Jordi Mollà) hankers to return Protestant England to its Catholic roots. He's surrounded by other cloaked gents and snivels shamelessly, like a cartoon villain. Meanwhile, Samantha Morton has nothing more to do than curl her lip and heave her bosom as Mary Stuart, Elizabeth's cousin who is so murderously desperate to be queen she hires a gang of Jesuit assassins. And Geoffrey Rush reprises his role as Francis Walsingham, the queen's scheming defenseman and homeland security adviser. This is all rather dull. Where's the political sophistication that made the first movie slightly more interesting? That was a decent game of chess. "The Golden Age" is checkers.
You stick with it only as an act of camp. The movie clearly finds Elizabeth's commitment to chastity her most stunning achievement. And it gets good, cheap laughs out of her sacrifice. When Raleigh tells the queen, he's named Virginia in her honor, she bellows and says, "If I were to be married, what will you call it? Conjugia?" (It's funnier to hear Blanchett say it.)
In "Elizabeth," Blanchett was an ingénue in a movie about a girl learning on the job. By the time of "The Golden Age," she's become the sort of star who's comfortable hamming it up and injecting a lot of supercilious humor into a part without sacrificing all the character's wisdom. (Her eyes roll like a bowling ball.) According to my math, the queen is about 47 now, and knows a thing or two about a thing or two. Except, alas, that thing. And, oh, how temptation tortures her.
Having remained single all these years by refusing to marry for politics or propriety (there's an amusing sequence with a collection of international suitors), Elizabeth finds a man, in Raleigh, whom she loves. But she can't bring herself to succumb fully, as if purity is the battery that powers her empire. Kapur provides a scene of the two riding alongside each other that feels like an apt if cruel metaphor. To keep him close, the queen dispatches her nubile lady-in-waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish). Terrible idea. But the film has its best fun with the sexual dynamic among the three of them.
Kapur is not a natural moviemaker, although some of the more random disco-y shots suggest a man who longs to make videos for Cher. Otherwise, the close-ups are too close, the aerial shots too high. Shadows still equal evil intrigue. And the big war is done mostly as a haphazardly assembled montage of incendiary chaos. But in those sequences, Owen does everything in his power - swinging from ropes, peering over the side of a ship, swimming underwater in slow-motion - to convince us it's 1935 and that he might be the second coming of Errol Flynn.
And as the world turns and the Spanish Armada burns, there is time to contemplate the beautiful intricacies of Alexandra Byrne's costumes - their outlandishness, too. (The queen's battle armor is nothing less than 16th-century C-3PO.) You might be inclined to think of names for Elizabeth's various wigs (I saw the Richard Simmons, the Streisand, and the Big Bang) and admire her triumphant combat stances. My favorite has her positioned at the edge of a cliff at dawn, nose in the air, a touch of romance in her gaze while she watches ship after ship afire - not unlike her heart. A penny for her thoughts would purchase, "I love the smell of char in the morning."
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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