Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Excerpts from Now, Warrior By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: October 12, 2007 “The director Shekhar Kapur, who put Ms. Blanchett through her flouncing paces in “Elizabeth,” the rather more restrained 1998 film about the monarch’s earlier years, doesn’t spend much time pondering the Sapphic possibilities, mostly because he has armies to unleash, conspiracies to uncork and one head to lop off (Samantha Morton as Mary Stuart). Even so, despite the hurried, sporadically frantic pace, there are a few nice moments in which Elizabeth uses Bess and Raleigh as erotic puppets, turning them into expressions of her own masculine and feminine selves, as if she were a child playing naughty with Barbie and Ken. In her spectral face you see a lonely soul trying to hold onto sanity, to a thread of real life.” “For much of “The Golden Age,” the filmmakers flirt suggestively with the idea that the English or perhaps the English-speaking world is engaged in another holy war against another set of radical fundamentalists. By the time the Spanish Armada has set sail for England, and Elizabeth has donned armor and a flowing red wig to rouse her waiting troops to victory, the suggestive has become explicit. Declaiming from atop her white horse, her legs now conspicuously parted as she straddles the jittery, stamping animal, she invokes God and country, blood and honor, life and death, bringing to mind at once Joan of Arc, Henry V, Winston Churchill and Tony Blair in one gaspingly unbelievable, cinematically climactic moment. The queenly body quakes as history and fantasy explode.” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A bodice rips, one head falls