Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

National Catholic Register ^ | Steven Gredanus

[Frank Sheed]

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

Directed by Shekhar Kapur. Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, Samantha Morton, Jordi Mollà.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

A lurid sort of Christopher Hitchens vision of history pervades Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his 1998 art-house hit Elizabeth.

The earlier film, which made a star of Cate Blanchett as the eponymous Virgin Queen, celebrated the triumph of bright, happy Elizabethan Protestantism over the dark, unwholesome Catholic world of Bloody Mary. Even so, that film’s church-bashing was tame compared that of this sequel, in which everything bad, evil and corrupt in the world ultimately is ultimately the bitter fruit of Religion. And by Religion, I mean Catholicism.

Yes, technically Protestantism might be a form of religious devotion too. But The Golden Age carefully expunges anything like actual belief or religiosity from its minimal portrayal of the faith affiliation of its heroine. Elizabeth might kneel in a brightly lit church in decorously silent, solitary prayer, but it’s Catholics who pray out loud, usually in spooky Latin, read from prayer books and clutch rosary beads, surround themselves with ominous berobed clerics bestowing church sanction on all manner of sinister goings-on, and worst of all, have religious ideas and motivations.

If someone says something like “God has spoken to me,” it’s a sure bet that (a) the speaker is a Catholic, and (b) whatever God had to say spells trouble for non-Catholics. Ditto any reference to “true believers,” “God’s work,” “legions of Christ,” you name it. In this world, God-talk is troubling Catholic behavior; Protestants don’t talk to, or about, God. Their religion is little more than a slogan for conscience, religious freedom, and of course heroic resistance to Catholic oppression.

“I will not punish my people for their beliefs — only for their deeds,” says Elizabeth, conveniently forgetting that in the last movie she rammed the Act of Uniformity through Parliament, outlawing the Catholic Mass and imposing compulsory attendance at Anglican services. In this version of history, the hosts of Catholics martyred under Elizabeth are all traitors and conspirators. “Every Catholic in England is a potential assassin,” Elizabeth’s advisors helpfully remind her in an early scene. Well, then, every Catholic in England is a potential political prisoner too.

Historically, the film is very loosely tethered to events from the 1580s, notably the execution of Mary Stuart (wasted Samantha Morton) and the defeat of the Spanish Armada of Philip II of Spain (Jordi Mollà). Opening titles inform us that Philip (a “devout Catholic,” in case you were wondering) has “plunged Europe into holy war,” and “only England stands against him.” Whom this holy war is being waged against, if “only England stands against him,” is not specified. Presumably the reference is to resistance to Turkish encroachment in the Mediterranean, but far be it from The Golden Age to muddy the waters of Catholic warmongering by mentioning Muslim expansion.

In attacking England, Philip is convinced that he’s on a mission from God: “England is enslaved to the devil,” he declares. “We must set her free.” Certain that God is on his side as he leads his nation into a holy war that becomes a debacle, Philip couldn’t be a blacker, nuttier Hollywood villain if his middle initial were W. Other flirtations with topicality in this pre-election year include assassins and conspirators praying secretly in a foreign language while plotting their murderous attacks, and the Machiavellian Sir Francis Walsingham (returning Geoffrey Rush) torturing a captured conspirator during an interrogation. (Tom Hollander, who costarred with Rush in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, is running around somewhere in this picture, an odd juxtaposition in another film that ends with a sea battle with cannons.)

The film does go on to concede that the Spanish have other grievances against the English besides religion, such as the Queen’s tolerant stance on English pirates like Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) raiding Spanish ships. But it’s all a big circle: The raids are rationalized on the grounds that Philip is Elizabeth’s enemy, and the more gold English privateers seize from Spanish vessels, the less Philip has to wage war on England. That the raids give Philip more justification for going to war hardly matters, since we already know that he’s on a mission from God.

The romanticized Hollywood view of heroic English piracy against the galleons of Catholic Spain in old Errol Flynn–type movies like The Sea Hawk has always rubbed me the wrong way, and it hasn’t gotten any better with the passing of time. Or the substitution of Owen for Flynn.

The film’s romantic intrigues are if possible duller than its religio-political ones, though here at least the actors are able — occasionally — to rise above their material. Not always; in some scenes even Blanchett seems absurdly lost amid the puerility of her character’s romantic woes.

The original Elizabeth imagined the young queen carrying on a flagrant affair with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes), but ended with its protagonist reinventing herself as a kind of Protestant Madonna figure, an iconic “Virgin Queen” (or at least “Like A Virgin” Queen, to borrow a phrase from another self-reinventing Madonna).

In this film, Elizabeth maintains her celibate image, her singleness given a feminist gloss in a closing monologue: “Unmarried, I have no master; childless, I am mother to my people. God give me strength to bear this mighty freedom.” The freedom of the single career woman!

As in the earlier film, the queen holds herself aloof from the constant pressure to marry and produce an heir, though there is no shortage of unsuitable suitors. There are more sparks with Raleigh, though he is more drawn to dewy young Bess (Abbie Cornish), a favored lady-in-waiting on whom the queen in turn dotes tenderly enough to suggest that the triangle goes all the way around. (There were also hints of something between Elizabeth and a lady-in-waiting in the original film.)

Elizabeth’s wonder at Raleigh’s rhapsodic account of his arrival in the New World is about as close to a positive religious experience as The Golden Age can muster. The ocean, Elizabeth muses, is a very “image of eternity,” and she wonders, “Do we discover the new world, or does the new world discover us?”

When it comes to literal religiosity, though, The Golden Age’s sensibilities are wholly unsympathetic. The climax, a weakly staged destruction of the Spanish Armada, is a crescendo of church-bashing imagery: rosaries floating amid burning flotsam, inverted crucifixes sinking to the bottom of the ocean, the rows of ominous berobed clerics slinking away in defeat.

Pound for pound, minute for minute, Elizabeth: The Golden Age could possibly contain more sustained church-bashing than any other film I can think of. Certainly the premise of The Da Vinci Code was far more objectionable, and The Magdalene Sisters was more absolute in its moral color-coding. (The torture of a young Catholic conspirator, even though guilty, represents a shade of grey that The Magdalene Sisters’s black-and-white approach would never have permitted.)

But in The Da Vinci Code the heavies were a secret cabal within the Church, not the visible hierarchy and all Catholics everywhere. An albino monk assassin is one thing (Opus Dei not being available in the sixteenth century, this film’s priest-assassin is supplied by the Jesuits). Here, “every Catholic in England” is at least potentially an assassin. The Magdalene Sisters may have been agitprop, but it highlighted genuine abuses within a Catholic institution, rather than depicting the Church and the Catholic faith as a force for evil and celebrating resistance to Catholicism as heroic humanism.

How is it possible that this orgy of anti-Catholicism has been all but ignored by most critics? As with The Da Vinci Code, early reviews of The Golden Age seem to be roundly dismissive, while sticking to safe, noncommittal charges of general lameness.[*]

If the object of the film’s vitriol were any group outside Christendom — say, if praying in Arabic were the sure sign of dangerous fanaticism, and if a Muslim prince were making holy war on Christendom with the blessings of all the eminent imams — would there be any shortage of critical objections to such stereotyping? As a lover of film criticism as well as film, I find the reviews more depressing than the film.

* Note: One of the few reviews in a major outlet that doesn’t ignore the film’s anti-Catholicism ran in my local New York area paper, the Newark Star-Ledger. Critic Stephen Whitty writes that the film “equates Catholicism with some sort of horror-movie cult, with scary close-ups of chanting monks and glinting crucifixes. There’s even a murderous Jesuit, played by Rhys Ifans like a Hammer-movie bad guy, or a second cousin to poor pale Silas from The Da Vinci Code.”

A sexual encounter (nothing explicit); brief rear female nudity; some crude language; a couple of gory torture/mutilation scenes and non-explicit execution/killings.

[RobbyS]

You misrepresent the case of Copernicus whose theory was mainly a revival of an old Greek cosmology. It was “dangerous” primarily not because of any religious heterodoxy but because it went against the scholarship of the day—A bit like the ID position in the matter of evolution, it could be regarded with suspicion by all in authority. Copernicus himself proposed his version of this theory because of the difficulties with Ptolemy’s theory arising from new observations. However, his theory was flawed because it supposed that the planets moved around the sun in circles. It was not until Kepler’s work that the heliocentric system was made compatible with the data. Galileo got in trouble with the Church authorities when he pushed the envelop of acceptance. He had been told to present his theory as hypothesis; he insistence of arguing that it was absolutely certain. But as his proof was geometrical in character, and certainly was generally expressed in terms of Aristotelean physics, his reasoning found no acceptance. It was untimely, as Einstein’s theory of relativity would have been if he had proposed it before the Michaleson-Morley experiment disproved the ether theory. Galileo displayed the typical arrogance of genius, and it get him into deep trouble.
As for Bruno, he was deep into mysticism and insisted on holding to some wild theories, including multiple universes. Dangerous stuff in the midst of
religious wars that were tearing nations apart.

[KC Burke]

I thought there was more complexity to the first one. This one was a little comic book like, IMHO.

It seemed anti-religous in general, not just against RCs. But, what hollywood stuff ins’t?

The reviews were way off in the main as many said it was wooden and only showed the history and not the context and feelings. I felt the opposite was true.

To me, I felt the heavy hand of the screen writer and director too continuously and the amount of emotional context to each issue was overdone.

The simplification of court intrige and characters was a shortcoming as well. It was as though she only had one minister rather than the plethora of pushy advisers as shown in the first film.

My wife and I felt is was a worthwhile trip to the theater as we are both history buffs. She has read a lot on this era, beginning with all the Allison Wier stuff and she enjoyed it tremendously since it dealt with an era where the historical context was well known to her.

I thought the portrayal of her martial involvement was too over the top but I guess I went with a more critical eye.

I imagine we will buy the DVD which is the true measure of approval in our household.

[KC Burke]

see my comments at 102

[Tax-chick]

Other flirtations with topicality in this pre-election year include assassins and conspirators praying secretly in a foreign language while plotting their murderous attacks, and the Machiavellian Sir Francis Walsingham (returning Geoffrey Rush) torturing a captured conspirator during an interrogation. (Tom Hollander, who costarred with Rush in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, is running around somewhere in this picture, an odd juxtaposition in another film that ends with a sea battle with cannons.)

Heh, finally got around to reading the review. Much as Cate Blanchett annoys me, seeing the above actors in said roles might be worth a library checkout when I have to spend an evening sewing patches on everyone's Scout uniforms. (One can't drink and sew at the same time, without damage.)

[Tax-chick]

On the other hand, we could get the 3rd “Pirates” installment, which has Chow Yun-Fat in it. He’s kewl.

[juliej]

As opposed to cranky “Bloody Mary”?????/

[juliej]

Cat is gorgeous and Philip II was very cruel. May have had his son murdered.

[Clemenza]

The Caribs and Arawaks largely died from diseases. In Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, the indigenous people disappeared via intermarriage and assimilation.

The Spanish and the Portuguese were much more tolerant in terms of race and ethnicity than the English EVER were. Remember, that, by law, the illegitimate offspring of Spanish men and Indian and black women had to be recognized as the child of said father, and that it was expected that the father would be present at the baptism. This practice ended with colonialism, but contrast it to the behavior of the Anglos with THEIR illegitimate offspring in the new world.

"Enslavement" of the Indians was abolished via the efforts of Father Bartolome de las Casas. Besides, due to their poor resistence to disease, the Indians did not make good slaves. Enter the Africans.

The "black legend" around the Spaniards and Portuguese is Anglo Saxon propaganda based, in the best case, on exaggeration and, in the worse case, on out and out lies.

[juliej]

The Spanish and Portuguese were slow to end slavery especially in Brazil.

[Clemenza]

See #108. The Mexica (mistakenly called "Aztecas" by an elderly priest) were forceably assimilated under Spanish rule, and their descendants became the original mestizos. The main Indian groups that survived assimilation were either up in the mountains or well beyond the areas of settlement.

So, if you buy the argument that forced assimilation is cultural genocide then, yes, there was genocide against the Mexica/Aztecs. To me, it just shows a key difference between the Spanish/Portuguese/French colonial attitude toward the conquered (partial, imperfect assimilation) versus that of the English (segregation, albeit with respect for the customs of the Indians who "weren't in the way").

Argentina is the great "outlier" in that the post-Colonial era was filled with a bitter, bloody war for control of the interior. General Rosas won that battle handily, allowing for the country to be settled by immigrants from all over Europe.

[Tax-chick]

General Rosas won that battle handily, allowing for the country to be settled by immigrants from all over Europe.

Can you recommend a book on this?

[Clemenza]

Many in Spanish, too few in English. David Rock's History of Argentina covers this subject well, as does Daniel Lewis's "History of Argentina."

Of course, there is "Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism" written by one of Rosas's successors (and one of the founders of public schooling in the western hemisphere) Fausto Sarmiento.

[bert]

they’re still licking their wounds.

[Tax-chick]

Thank you! I could probably get through a history in Spanish, with a little help from the on-line dictionary, but I’m on a Henry James binge in every spare minute right now :-).

I’ll look for the English books you mention in the library this week. All the years of Spanish language and culture courses, and I have to admit I know almost nothing about Argentina. Gauchos.

[SoCal Pubbie]

“It is estimated that in the space of 130 years 2,000,000 Indians were slain or carried into captivity by these Brazilian slave-hunters.”

That’s from The Catholic Encyclopedia BTW.

[x_plus_one]

There is a lot of water under the bridge in English history with respect to the reformation. One of the best English historical narratives is by Churchill in his History of the English Speaking People.

English History is all about wars of succession and how everybody was affected (destroyed) by the eternal blood wars for king of the hill in England.

James Michener's Carribean does a good job of showing the enmity between heretical Brits and the Spanish civilization when Spain represented the will of the European establishment. Spanish customs and reality were like oil and water with respect to the English in Elizabethan times. Centuries of moorish cultural influence color Spanish temperament to this day. It was the greatest good possible to bring heretic England back into the fold of the church and Spain was the mightiest military power to help the Holy See to do so.

The lack of historical knowledge by modern film makers is obvious. What's worse is the lack of respect that Asians have for other religions and history than their own. The asian treatment of Elizabethan history suits their agenda to secularize history - after all - isn't their hindu or moslem faith just as relevant to their target audience and isn't Christianity an easy target to ridicule?

[trisham]

Thanks! It’s difficult to find a good movie these days, much less one that is historical. I believe I will give this one a try after all.

[stripes1776]

Not much, which all goes to show that religious toleration as we understand it is a fairly recent concept

Something we agree on.

[stripes1776]

He had been told to present his theory as hypothesis; he insistence of arguing that it was absolutely certain.

He should have listened. He would have been a better scientist if he had. There is never certainty in science. Nothing is ever proven in science. No measurement is ever precise but carries an estimate of error with it. Furthermore, inductive reasoning is never a proof unless there is complete enumeration, and that is impossible in scientific measurements. The experimental data may support a theory, but it never proves it.

But as his proof was geometrical in character

It wasn't a proof. It was an inductive argument.

the Michaleson-Morley experiment disproved the ether theory.

Michelson and Morley did not disprove theories using the concept of the ether. Their experiment showed that the speed of light was constant. Their measurements contradicted Newtonian physics (Galilean relativity) which says that the speed of light is relative. After the MM experiment, lots of physicists came up with complicated theories that maintained the existence of the ether. But Einstein won because of the principle of Occam's razor: the simplest theory that explains the most wins.

Newton said space and time are constant and the speed of light is relative; Einstein said space and time are relative and the speed of light is constant. Nice and simple, once you let go of the idea of space and time being constant. But when you do that, there is no need to postulate the existence of ether. But there is a problem with Einstein's theory: it contradicts quantum mechanics. Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life trying to resolve that conflict, but failed.

That contradiction lies at the heart of modern physics. There are some theories now that propose to have the resolution. Which one will win a consensus among physicists? We will have have to wait and see.

[RobbyS]

By geometric, I mean it was expressed in geometric terms, as was Ptolemy’s, or any scientist for still another hundred years after Galileo until modern annaliyical tools were developed. But don’t despise induction: this is really the approach that St. Thomas did when he was trying to “prove” the existence of God.