Gaining Favour

The Favourite a film by Yorgis Lanthimos.  With Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone.  ****

The Favourite is one of those movies that takes a historical setting—in this case early eighteenth century Great Britain—and throws a bunch of characters into it who seem entirely modern, so we wind up thinking how funny it all is without asking ourselves if the whole thing seems likely, or true.  When a woman named Abigail is stymied in one of her schemes, she walks down the hallway saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” words (or a word) that would have been shocking in 1953, to say nothing of 1703, so we burst into laughter at the incongruity of it all.  Wow, we think.  They’re just like us.

That’s because they essentially are us.  They’re just wearing goofy costumes, and surrounded by candlelight.

The Woman in Power (Olivia Colman) is overweight and shrill and hypochondriacal and just kind of nuts, and she is courted by another woman (Rachel Weisz) who knows how to control her, by being firm sometimes and soft and loving at others; she plays her like a big bass fiddle.  Into this situation comes an upstart (Emma Stone) who has fallen on hard times—to the point of being a whore and scullery maid—but is of noble birth, and sees an opportunity to gain favour (she’s the fuck fuck fuck woman).  As Rachel Weisz apparently said, The Favourite is “like a funnier, sex-driven All About Eve,” and when the choice is between Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone you can’t go wrong.

The Woman in Power is the Queen of England, Queen Anne to be precise.  Her close confidant is Lady Sarah (whose direct descendants include Winston Churchill and Lady Diana), and the little upstart is our friend Abigail.  They are all heavily (pardon the expression) into lesbian sex, even though Queen Anne has been married and lost a number of children to miscarriage, Lady Sarah is currently married—to the man, Lord Marlborough, who is leading the war against France—and Abigail gets married in the course of the action, indicating she has made it back into society and won’t need to be a scullery maid anytime soon (though being a wife in this situation is more or less like being a whore).

Every man in this movie is an utter fop, more concerned with his frilly clothes and ridiculous wig than with anything substantial.  One guy is so overcome at the sight of Abigail that he whacks off in the stagecoach that takes her to court, and her mating ritual with her future husband is more or less a rasslin’ match, with various bites, slaps, insults, and the occasional knee to the balls.  The lesbian sex, on the other hand, is all lovey dovey, but Lady Sarah and Abigail don’t seem in the least bit sincere.  At one point, Abigail is wheeling the Queen along in her wheelchair, which the woman seems to occupy because she’s so stout, and says to her, “You’re so beautiful.”  The Queen replies, “Stop it, you mock me.”  And Abigail says, “I do not.  If I were a man, I would ravish you!”

Excuse me, but if she were a man, he would run in the other direction as fast as his foppish little legs could carry him.

Queen Anne—two days after I saw the movie Olivia Colman won the Oscar for this performance—is capricious and neurotic; her foreign policy depends on how she feels at the moment (does that sound like any head of state you can think of?).  She’s also seriously overweight (that seals the deal; the head of state I was thinking of has just been declared officially obese), screams at people for no reason, says things that are startlingly frank (“I like her tongue inside me”) and takes solace from her difficult state by horsing down food and flip flopping her foreign policy.  Now and then she stands before Parliament and collapses in a heap.

I agree that Colman gave a good performance, though I don’t know that I’d call it great (she apparently gained 35 pounds for the role, 2.5 stone for you Anglophiles.  She was back to her slender self by Oscar night, just in time to appear in some ridiculous gown).  Her closest competition was Glenn Close in The Wife, making this the Year of the Angry Woman, though neither was as pissed off as my pick, Nicole Kidman in Destroyer.  Colman gave what I would call a comic performance, the movie has so many gag lines.  I have no idea if it bears any relationship to history.  I also don’t really see the point of the whole thing.  One woman does emerge as The Favourite, though any such ascension seems temporary in Queen Anne’s court.  Give her twenty minutes and ask her again.

My wife and I watched this Academy Award winner, on the night before the awards, on Amazon, paying a staggering $14.00.  That’s still cheaper than a trip to the theater, and we didn’t have to put up with waiters bringing in Queen Anne sized meals, moviegoers eating copiously and loudly, seven previews, people talking loudly (because it’s “just the preview”) during all seven.  I love going out to the movies, but there’s something to be said for the Amazon option.  Instead of racing for the restroom you hit the pause button.

I’ve always thought the eighteenth century was the frankest of all the centuries of British literature, also had the boldest and most straightforward literary style.  I’m not sure it was quite like this.