☆☆☆
Yorgos Lanthimos knows that Dostoyevsky's old pronouncement about happy families is irrelevant in today's world -- we've moved far beyond mere happiness or pain and into freakish levels of suffering. Look around and be brave enough to call it as you see it: It may look like taunting, teasing and bullying, but it goes well beyond that. We're killing each other, engaging in torture for the sport of it.
Lanthimos makes movies like an ethnographer who doesn't understand the language but merely observes the results, and he applies filmmaking styles that don't seem to match the obscenities he is depicting on screen. The Lobster offers the nervous energy of a satirical comedy even while it puts the main character into impossible (literally) ethical quandaries. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a vile and hateful film, yet I've seen it twice, because in depicting its depraved story, Lanthimos seems brave, even sad for his knowledge of just how far people will go while seeming to remain absolutely sane.
Which brings us to The Favourite, Lanthimos' second film in as many years, and one that is more forthright than The Lobster in acknowledging that it's trying to be funny and maybe even more sinister than Sacred Deer since the victims of its cruelties aren't just a family but, ultimately, an entire country and political system.
Whether its historically accurate or not is beyond my abilities, but The Favourite seems to go to extraordinarily lengths to depict the court of Queen Anne in the early 18th century; as a movie, I may have found it a bit draggy in parts, but as a replication of the way Anne ran her palace and her country, it's impressively exacting.
At the center of the story are the Queen, a sickly and lonely woman who harbors sexual and romantic feelings for Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, who in turn has become the voice of the crown -- she goes so far as to make strategic military decisions, claiming to be delivering the decree of the queen herself. The palace is made an even weirder place by Anne's 17 bunny rabbits, each of whom represents one of the 17 children Anne miscarried. Into this odd and frequently severe environment drops Sarah's cousin, Abigail, who arrives penniless to implore Sarah to give her a job, but quickly learns of the palace's secrets and begins conniving her way into influence.
It all would make for a terrific PBS series, and in fact a cursory glance at online articles shows that the basic plot is astonishingly true. But The Favourite is anything but a staid and stodgy costume drama, and anything but straightforward. The three central performances by Olivia Colman as Anne, Rachel Weisz as Sarah, and Emma Stone as Abigail, are massively entertaining and monstrous in their depth of feeling. As the movie moves along at fits and starts it becomes clear that Lanthimos is doing something sly by turning the only sympathetic character at the film's start -- Abigail -- into the movie's villain, while Sarah turns from cold-hearted political climber to the victim of enormous violence.
Something tells me that The Favourite is a movie that will grow on me both with time and repeated viewings the way The Killing of a Sacred Deer did, but it's a problematic movie on many levels, vacillating in tone and approach with uncomfortable frequency. Unlike Lanthimos' two previous English-language movies, it lacks a sure-handed style, which may have been deliberate but leads to unpredictable shifts in mood that leave audiences unsure where to turn for some grounding.
Maybe that's part of the point, though -- that when jealousy, betrayal, disloyalty and violence come into play, nothing's predictable, and what started out as amusing turns shocking with vicious speed.
Most satisfyingly, the movie relegates its male performers to the background, often serving as emotional or sexual props while giving the women of the story the credit for the enormous power they wielded, both over each other and over the world.
Yes, even as I write this I sense my feelings toward The Favourite are shifting, but I'm not quite sure how. Moment to moment, the movie often doesn't quite work, behaving a little too badly, offering up a little too much merriment amid the hostility, and yet as a whole, especially with a cryptic and disturbing final shot, it lingers. It's going to be a while until I figure out quite what to think about The Favourite, and just as with Lanthimos's previous films, maybe that's a good thing.
Viewed December 1, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1415
Lanthimos makes movies like an ethnographer who doesn't understand the language but merely observes the results, and he applies filmmaking styles that don't seem to match the obscenities he is depicting on screen. The Lobster offers the nervous energy of a satirical comedy even while it puts the main character into impossible (literally) ethical quandaries. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a vile and hateful film, yet I've seen it twice, because in depicting its depraved story, Lanthimos seems brave, even sad for his knowledge of just how far people will go while seeming to remain absolutely sane.
Which brings us to The Favourite, Lanthimos' second film in as many years, and one that is more forthright than The Lobster in acknowledging that it's trying to be funny and maybe even more sinister than Sacred Deer since the victims of its cruelties aren't just a family but, ultimately, an entire country and political system.
Whether its historically accurate or not is beyond my abilities, but The Favourite seems to go to extraordinarily lengths to depict the court of Queen Anne in the early 18th century; as a movie, I may have found it a bit draggy in parts, but as a replication of the way Anne ran her palace and her country, it's impressively exacting.
At the center of the story are the Queen, a sickly and lonely woman who harbors sexual and romantic feelings for Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, who in turn has become the voice of the crown -- she goes so far as to make strategic military decisions, claiming to be delivering the decree of the queen herself. The palace is made an even weirder place by Anne's 17 bunny rabbits, each of whom represents one of the 17 children Anne miscarried. Into this odd and frequently severe environment drops Sarah's cousin, Abigail, who arrives penniless to implore Sarah to give her a job, but quickly learns of the palace's secrets and begins conniving her way into influence.
It all would make for a terrific PBS series, and in fact a cursory glance at online articles shows that the basic plot is astonishingly true. But The Favourite is anything but a staid and stodgy costume drama, and anything but straightforward. The three central performances by Olivia Colman as Anne, Rachel Weisz as Sarah, and Emma Stone as Abigail, are massively entertaining and monstrous in their depth of feeling. As the movie moves along at fits and starts it becomes clear that Lanthimos is doing something sly by turning the only sympathetic character at the film's start -- Abigail -- into the movie's villain, while Sarah turns from cold-hearted political climber to the victim of enormous violence.
Something tells me that The Favourite is a movie that will grow on me both with time and repeated viewings the way The Killing of a Sacred Deer did, but it's a problematic movie on many levels, vacillating in tone and approach with uncomfortable frequency. Unlike Lanthimos' two previous English-language movies, it lacks a sure-handed style, which may have been deliberate but leads to unpredictable shifts in mood that leave audiences unsure where to turn for some grounding.
Maybe that's part of the point, though -- that when jealousy, betrayal, disloyalty and violence come into play, nothing's predictable, and what started out as amusing turns shocking with vicious speed.
Most satisfyingly, the movie relegates its male performers to the background, often serving as emotional or sexual props while giving the women of the story the credit for the enormous power they wielded, both over each other and over the world.
Yes, even as I write this I sense my feelings toward The Favourite are shifting, but I'm not quite sure how. Moment to moment, the movie often doesn't quite work, behaving a little too badly, offering up a little too much merriment amid the hostility, and yet as a whole, especially with a cryptic and disturbing final shot, it lingers. It's going to be a while until I figure out quite what to think about The Favourite, and just as with Lanthimos's previous films, maybe that's a good thing.
Viewed December 1, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1415
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