Saoirse Ronan gives regal display as the Queen of Scots
Mary Queen of Scots 15 cert, 124 min ★★★★★ Dir Josie Rourke
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie, Jack Lowden, Joe Alwyn, James Mcardle, David Tennant, Adrian Lester, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Gemma Chan, Martin Compston
Mary, Queen of Scots got her head chopped off, but what was going on inside it beforehand? This lush and ravishing period piece offers a close inspection of the tickings and whirrings of the Scottish monarch’s early reign, going past the martyr-whore image of popular legend.
The focus is Mary’s relationship with her cousin, Elizabeth I of England – and as two powerful young women hemmed in by the male-dominated mechanisms of 16th-century statecraft, theirs is a rivalry with acres of common ground.
The film is led by a performance of thrilling regality and nuance from Saoirse Ronan as Mary – noteperfect accent, too – and has been adapted from John Guy’s 2004 biography by Beau Willimon, the creator of Netflix’s House of Cards revival, and a specialist in nimble political knifework. It is also the directorial debut of Josie Rourke, the outgoing artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse.
The plot is bookended by Mary’s execution in 1587, for which she wears a blood-red petticoat: one of many historically accurate details Lavish: Saoirse Ronan leads the way with, from left, Ian Hart, Jack Lowden and James Mcardle, and Margot Robbie, below here that on screen look like pure expressionistic flourish. But the meat of the film concerns the period between her arrival in Scotland from France 26 years earlier to a fictional clandestine summit between her and Elizabeth in the late 1560s, shortly after Mary’s enforced third marriage to the Earl of Bothwell (Martin Compston). Elizabeth is played by a Bafta-nominated Margot Robbie, whose casting is not quite against type but very much against glamorous expectations, with the character’s spider-web hair, hooked nose and bouts of pox.
Mary makes her designs on England clear from the start, but it is the men around her and Elizabeth who engineer this ambition into a crisis. As anyone who went to school in Scotland knows, this story has a deep bench of vivid supporting players, and all are richly brought to life here: I loved Jack Lowden’s smirking and dissolute Lord Darnley, Mary’s primary suitor; James Mcardle’s sullen Earl of Moray; Adrian Lester’s tactful court ambassador; and David Tennant’s gimlet-eyed take on John Knox, the men’s rights Youtuber of his day and one of Mary’s most relentless detractors. The casting is less uniformly white than period dramas often are – something theatre has long carried off less awkwardly than film – and this lends both Scottish and English courts a cosmopolitan air that contrasts nicely with the dour stone walls and guttering candlelight.
There is so much plot, and indeed plotting, for the film to chew through that its final third often feels hurried, and buffeted along by Max Richter’s very trailer-like score, which always sounds as if it’s about to break into Zadok the Priest at any moment. But the notable exception is the two queens’ apocryphal meeting in a washhouse, which not only gives Ronan and Robbie a welcome chance to butt heads dramatically, but also shows off the sheer range of the frocks by Alexandra Byrne – another Bafta nominee – who also costumed Shekhar Kapur’s pair of Elizabeth films with Cate Blanchett. Here she uses denim to give Mary and her handmaidens a pragmatic, no-nonsense air, while kitting out Elizabeth in some outfits of almost Tim Burton-like queasy excess.
Mary Queen of Scots is arriving just in the nick of time for awards season, but also in proximity to Yorgos Lanthimos’s significantly more eccentric The Favourite, set at Queen Anne’s court in the early 1700s. No need for a decapitating catfight here, though: there’s absolutely room for both.