The Favourite: Three’s a Royal Crowd

Today, because we’re living in the #MeToo era, we’re well accustomed to seeing powerful men indulge themselves by making the women around them bend to their will. In The Favourite, by Yorgos Lanthimos, who had previously amused and puzzled filmgoers with The Lobster, #MeToo is stood on its head. The film’s chief female characters are anything but helpless victims. Instead, the eighteenth-century women played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are rude, crude, and very much on the make. No shrinking violets, they gravitate toward power, and know how to use sexuality (as well as belligerence and guile) in order to get it. Unfortunately for them, each is determined to replace the other, in a struggle that becomes increasingly grizzly as the film wears on.

How curious that their target is not only another woman but one of royal birth. The historical record tells us that  Queen Anne of Great Britain, the last monarch of the Stuart line, was fated by circumstance to not have an easy time on the throne. By 1702, when her twelve-year reign began, she had lost a beloved husband to smallpox and buried seventeen young children, many of whom were stillborn. Badly afflicted with gout, Anne suffered great pain. As portrayed in the movie by the impressive Olivia Colman, she was a vain and indecisive woman, easy prey for the domineering Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), who advanced her husband’s military career and her own social standing by effectively making policy on Anne’s behalf.

Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, is a genuine historic figure, an ancestor of both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. I suspect that Abigail, the character played by Emma Stone, has no such historical roots. Still, she fits nicely into Lanthimos’s portrayal of the British royal court. The daughter of a down-on-his-luck aristocrat, she has the smarts and the breeding to succeed at court, even though she starts as a lowly scullery maid. A tart tongue and a shrewd grasp of the court’s power dynamics gets her into the presence of Queen Anne; flattery and sexual wiles keep her there. But like Sarah, she is not destined to achieve contentment. That’s part of the price you pay when sucking up to royalty: you can easily be replaced when the monarch moves on to something (or someone) else.

Colman’s portrait of Queen Anne is a deeply memorable one, though it’s doubtless not the final word on Anne’s achievements. There’s evidence she took serious interest in affairs of state, and did at least some good while on the throne, serving as a patroness of theatre, poetry, and music. She subsidized the career of one of England’s greatest composers, George Frederick Handel, and knighted Isaac Newton in 1705. But basically The Favourite left me relieved that my own nation is not subject to the whims of an hereditary ruler, nor to those of the courtiers who (at least temporarily) find favor in royal eyes. Still, Americans have come to know what it’s like to be under the leadership of someone who is mercurial, impetuous, and susceptible to flattery. Which is one more way that The Favourite, a tale of eighteenth-century England, seems all too appropriate for the United States of America in 2019.

 As always in British films of this ilk, production values are dazzling, though the movie is also marked by Lanthimos’s occasional oddball aesthetic choices. Period costumes and music vie for our attention with graphic nudity and strange, grotesque moments (like some choreography with moves that look suspiciously like break-dancing) that remind us we’re in the 21^st century after all.

“First Man” and “The Wife”: A Tale of Two High-Flying Achievers (and their spouses)

First Man, based on a biography of Neil Armstrong, is the story of the first human being to walk on the moon. The Wife, a screen adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s novel, concerns a woman who lives in her husband’s shadow. At first blush, the real-life story of a celebrated man and the fictional tale of an overlooked woman wouldn’t seem to have much in common. But for me these two films (one of which I saw on an airplane and the other in a hotel room) spark a lot of deep thoughts about the role played by gender in two twentieth-century success stories.

As portrayed by Ryan Gosling, who tamps down his usual sparkle for this role, Neil Armstrong is the epitome of the strong silent type. A military man and an apparently fearless test pilot, he is a natural for the early astronaut corps. There is never any question about his competence and courage. His only apparent weakness lies in a deep-seated inability to talk a good game. He’s just not gifted (in the way of someone like John Glenn) when it comes to schmoozing the press and the public. When called on to make a grand pronouncement about his role in the upcoming moon mission, he can only stammer out a slightly awkward statement about being pleased to be chosen. Fortunately, the American people are charmed by his modesty.

According to the film, Armstrong’s natural reticence grew more intense when his young daughter died, at age 2, of a brain tumor. He mourns her in silence, unable to share his emotions even with his loyal wife Janet (played by Claire Foy, who seems to be making a career of playing both English queens and American historical icons like Ruth Bader Ginsburg). When Armstrong takes mankind’s first steps onto the lunar surface, it’s little Karen he’s thinking about, not the glory he’s bringing to the United States of America. Keeping one’s feelings locked inside is a classic male reaction to personal tragedy, but Armstrong seems to be an extreme case. The key moment in the movie comes when, going off to be launched into space, he tries to avoid any parting words to his two young sons. That’s when meek, supportive Janet finally fights back, firmly reminding him of what’s at stake: “You're gonna sit them down. Both of them. And you're going to prepare them for the fact that you might not ever come home. You're doing that. You. Not me. I'm done.”  (No wonder the marriage didn’t survive, though  officially it lasted for 38 years.)

 The Wife opens with a long-married couple in bed. Husband Harry (Jonathan Pryce) initiates sex, mostly because he’s too keyed-up to sleep. Both he and his compliant wife Joan (Glenn Close) know that in the wee hours of the following morning, Harry may be told that he’s won the Nobel Prize for literature. The movie contains flashbacks to the early years of their marriage, but primarily it follows the couple on the trip to Stockholm where he will claim his prize, one that he does not exactly deserve. The Wife is effective because it is not the obvious story of a heel and a doormat. These two care about each other, and – even when the cracks in their union become all too apparent – they can turn in a flash from fury to mutual joy or genuine concern. Still, in an era marked by #MeToo, this is a film that recognizes how a woman’s power can be subverted, even as she permits herself to be used and abused in the name of love. 

Cosby, Colette, and #MeToo

The sentencing of Bill Cosby to prison on sexual assault charges is a landmark moment for the #MeToo movement. At the time the sentence was handed down in a Pennsylvania courtroom, I was watching a film about yet another woman taken advantage of by a man. But in Colette, starring Keira Knightley as a young woman coming into her own as a writer, the male/female relationship is hardly a simple one. There’s no question that Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (known to all of France as Willy), stole her thunder by publishing her best-selling early books under his own name. But theirs was not a relationship based solely on a husband’s domination of a meek little wife. Wash Westmoreland’s film is quick to point out that the situation was considerably more complicated—and more interesting.

 In this new film version of the life of the celebrated French author (who culminated a long career with the 1944 novel Gigi), there’s an early scene where celebrated man-about-town Willy introduces his new young spouse at a Parisian soiree. She stands out amid the glittering crowd in her modest dress, and a woman with a deep décolletage archly quips that Willy’s wild days are clearly over. Colette promptly rebuts this with s smile: “The wild days have just begun.”

She seems, at this moment, a naïve young country girl, not far removed from wearing her hair in two long braids. Yes, she has sexually tussled in a barnyard with the much older Willy prior to taking her wedding vows, but she seems not to realize that his concept of male privilege will keep them from ever having a partnership of equals. He’s the one with the money, the career (as a sort of self-proclaimed publishing industry), and the romantic adventures on the side. She is supposed to wait meekly at home, first writing letters on his behalf and later penning the novels he will celebrate as his own creations.

But Colette is in fact less meek than she first appears. There’s a lusty side to her that will not be satisfied with her husband’s occasionally bedroom attentions. (As time passes, it’s clear that his needs—and also his abilities—are waning.) Colette welcomes the social attentions of young men in Willy’s circle, but soon makes clear it’s their wives who have really captured her attention. In one memorable segment, she boldly answers the call of a beautiful American heiress. The thought of her lesbian liaison seems to invigorate Willy, who also takes to calling on the heiress in what’s played as a sexy roundelay. (Willy has no trouble accepting Colette choosing a female lover, but makes clear that, for his wife, male sexual companionship is entirely off-limits.)

When the four Claudine novels (written by Colette, “authored” by Willy) become a sensation circa 1900, the “wild days” predicted by Colette have definitely arrived. The books trace the life of a sheltered country girl (much like Colette herself) who experiments with love in unlikely places. The film amusingly investigates the social phenomenon that has young women all over France putting on demure, white-collared black school uniforms and bobbing their hair to match the actress who portrays Claudine on stage. What fascinates me is how Willy clings to the image of the modest and yet sexually bold Claudine, to the point of insisting that Colette (and others) impersonate Claudine in the bedroom.  It’s an odd kind of Pygmalion story . . . but one in which Colette ultimately finds a way—an unconventional way, to be sure—to have a life of her own.