Royal epic rides roughshod over history
★★
(Cert 15, 124mins)
FILMS about kings and queens usually do well at awards ceremonies and this costume drama looks tailor-made for the Oscars. Production values are high, the outfits are gorgeous and previous nominees Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie star as two warring monarchs.
But this year, it looks like the two queens who will mop up the gongs will be Olivia Colman’s Anne and Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury.
To be fair, Robbie and Ronan had a lot less to work with. While director Yorgos Lanthimos found intrigue and comedy in the kinks of British history in his Queen Anne movie The Favourite, theatre director Josie Rourke seems intent on ironing them out. Here the very eventful life of Scotland’s controversial queen has been tidied up to service a conventional underdog story.
Mary Stuart (Ronan), who spent most of her childhood in the French court, lands on the coast of Scotland in 1561 sporting an spotless gown and speaking in a flawless Scottish accent.
As she’s a devout Catholic, her half-brother and Scotland’s acting monarch James (James McArdle) and firebrand Protestant preacher John Knox (David Tennant) aren’t in the mood to break out the bunting.
She also causes consternation in England which is under the nominal rule of Elizabeth (Robbie), a childless, unmarried Protestant.
Elizabeth’s advisor William Cecil (Guy Pearce) wants her to provide England with a Protestant heir but Mary thinks she has the divine right to rule both England and Scotland after Elizabeth’s death. And the conflict between the two queens mostly plays out as a series of long-distance arguments between plucky Mary and the scheming men of the English and Scottish courts.
The English send a Protestant English lord to Scotland and order Mary to marry him. She refuses and announces her engagement to a Catholic English lord (Jack Lowden).
The English send an ambassador (Adrian Lester) to tell her to dump him. She sends him back to tell them to do one.
In between, we get shots of scheming men whispering sexist insults cut between scenes of Mary behaving heroically and Elizabeth sadly embroidering flowers and pining for a child.
Mary’s reign involved battles, betrayal, murder and daring escapes, including one where she attempted to scale a castle wall while dressed as a servant. Here the action is distilled into a lacklustre skirmish on the banks of a Scottish river and a brutal scene where Mary’s crossdressing confidante David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova) is butchered in front of her.
And to make the Scottish queen the heroine, it seems they decided to turn the English queen into a simpering dolt. Since the real Elizabeth held on to the throne for 45 years and fought off an Armada, this feels rather unfair.
More importantly, it doesn’t work dramatically. Mary Queen Of Scots isn’t just unconvincing, it’s also rather dull.
GLASS ★★ (Cert 15, 129mins)
THE Sixth Sense earned writer/ director M. Night Shyamalan a reputation as a twist specialist but we had to wait a long time for the big reveal in his 2016 comeback movie Split.
In the final seconds, the pulpy horror about a mad kidnapper with multiple personalities (James McAvoy) unmasked itself as a spin-off from Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s arty 2000 drama where Bruce Willis’s train crash survivor turned into a super-
powered vigilante. It was a gasp-inducing finale that seemed to cleverly reference the franchise building of Marvel and DC Comics. But as it came from a director who had spent the last decade in the cinematic wilderness, it did pose a question: did anyone actually want a Shyamalan Cinematic Universe?
Hubris catches up with the director in Glass, a ponderous and preposterous thriller that yokes the two movies together.
After a reasonably actionpacked opening, the pace slows to a crawl when we’re locked up in an asylum with Willis’s David Dunn, McAvoy’s nutcase Kevin and Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Glass, Unbreakable’s brittle-boned supervillain.
Since we have met Kevin’s 24th personality, a superstrong,
wall-climbing cannibal called The Beast, security looks shockingly lax at the hospital and is the responsibility of two weedy orderlies.
And psychiatrist Dr Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) tries to convince her inmates that they are normal human beings during long discussions where they are tethered to lightweight office chairs.
Before we get to the inevitable breakout and showdown with Kevin and David, we have to endure Shyamalan elaborating his overblown mythology in clunky dialogue and witness McAvoy’s increasingly tedious one-man show. This time the big twist really isn’t worth the wait.
BEAUTIFUL BOY ★★★★
(Cert 15, 120mins)
“THERE are moments that I look at him, this kid that I raised, who I thought I knew inside and out, and I wonder who he is,” David Sheff (Steve Carell) says at the beginning of this touching indie drama.
David is talking about his eldest son Nic (Timothée Chalamet), a good-looking teenager who has been accepted at every university he has applied to.
Despite being a heroically great dad, David feels powerless to stop his son from destroying his life after he became addicted to crystal meth. Why Nic has turned to drugs is the film’s central unsolved mystery. We are never given an answer, making Beautiful Boy both refreshingly honest and slightly frustrating Nic’s parents are divorced but that isn’t held up as an explanation. Flashbacks show he enjoyed an idyllic childhood in a beautiful house. He has a caring stepmother and touching relationships with his two young half-siblings.
Instead, Belgian director Felix van Groeningen focuses on the psychological impact of his addiction upon the family. When David watches his daughter in a school play, his mind is clearly elsewhere.
Nic may have a very close relationship with his father but his brother and sister will have very different memories.
The film can be a hard watch but Carell and Chalamet have never been better.
MONSTERS AND MEN
★★★★
(Cert 15, 95mins)
WE don’t hear the chant Black Lives Matter in this gritty US drama as, although Monsters And Men is informed by the movement – inspired by the 2014 police shooting of Eric Garner – the film has more on its mind than easy slogans.
It is made up of three 30-minute sections which are linked by the police shooting of Darius Larson (Samel Edwards), a good-natured man from Brooklyn who sells loose cigarettes on a street corner.
In the first segment, we follow Manny Ortega (Anthony Ramos), a young father who films the shooting on his camera. When the police warn him to keep quiet, he must decide whether to put his desire for justice ahead of the needs of his family.
In the second instalment, John David Washington (Denzel’s son) plays a black cop who has turned a blind eye to the racism and corruption of his colleagues.
In the third, the shooting affects a high-school athlete (Kelvin Harrison Jr) who has to choose between political activism and a baseball scholarship.
After The Hate U Give and Blindspotting, this is another film that features a police shooting of an unarmed African American. But this time, the drama feels a lot more universal. These are essentially three good men who realise that this evil will prosper if they do nothing.
The film isn’t likely to attract large audiences in the UK but all three strands are beautifully shot and powerfully performed.