Royal-rumpus story throne for a loss
Mary Queen of Scots
(out of 4) Starring Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie, Jack Lowden, Guy Pearce, David Tennant, Adrian Lester, Gemma Chan and Ismael Cruz Cordova. Written by Beau Willimon. Directed by Josie Rourke. Opens Friday at the Varsity. 125 minutes. 14A
The historical record insists that royal cousins Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, a.k.a. Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, never actually met. Their pitched 16th-century rivalry to be the sole monarch of Scotland and England was conducted via letters and through messages conveyed by courtiers. This presents a problem for
Mary, Queen of Scots, yet another dramatic retelling of the conflict and the filmmaking debut of Josie Rourke, a veteran British stage director. The movie tries to have it both ways, by remaining mostly true to history while also taking numerous factual liberties.
The result is an artful muddle where the vexation on screen can be mirrored in frustration felt by the viewer.
Here we have two of the finest actors currently working: Saoirse Ronan (as Mary) and Margot Robbie (as Elizabeth), both of them Oscar-nominated for their previous films, Lady Bird and I, Tonya respectively. The prospect of their dramatic confrontation is an enticing one, and the misleading trailers are cut to suggest that we’ll see a lot of them together.
Which is probably how director Rourke and scripter Beau Willimon ( House of Cards) should have proceeded, history be damned.
If Quentin Tarantino could reconjure the Second World War for dramatic effect for Inglou- rious Basterds, why couldn’t Rourke and Willimon do the same here? (Perhaps they felt constrained by the title of John Guy’s source book: Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart.)
Instead we get a fabulously bewigged, gowned and made-up Ronan and Robbie railing against each other from afar and from within dimly lit rooms, heard only by minions both loyal and not (these include characters played by Guy Pearce and David Tennant). On occasions when the camera is actually moved outside, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
There is some consolation in that Ronan and Robbie remain excellent at their craft. The central conflict is hobbled by poor writing and design, but the eternal struggle of being a woman in a power scenario dominated by men remains, and the two leads amply illustrate it.
Mary, the more forthright and adamant of the two women, is obliged by circumstance to accept a drunken fool for a husband, played by Jack Lowden, in order to produce the son that will help bolster her case to rule both kingdoms of what would later be known as Great Britain.
Elizabeth, initially more conciliatory than those misleading trailers suggest, at least until scheming males poisoned her mind, has her own personal trials: a scarring bout of smallpox and an inability to bear children that leave her feeling she’s “more man than woman now.”
When the two women finally do meet, in a weird scene staged inside a laundry hut amidst drapes and sheets that partially obscure them, it seems Rourke and Willimon have finally yielded to dramatic imperative but only with the greatest of reluctance.
Whatever their motivation, it’s too little and too late to save the movie.