Mary, Queen of Scots (2018)

The Godmother
or
"They Are Sisters" (In a World Without Love)

It seems that every decade has to have their own movie about Mary, Queen of Scots and her struggle with the reigning Queen Elizabeth I, her cousin. She has been portrayed by Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and recently (in Cate Blanchett's "Elizabeth" films) by Samantha Morton. The various films sway between sides being taken, finding Mary either a bold, presumptive opportunist, or a wronged legitimate heir to the throne (and Elizabeth portrayed as a calculating shrew). It all depends on whether you're Protestant or Catholic, Anglophile or Spec-Historian, "Team" Tudor or "Team" Stuart. There are a lot of sides, just as there were at the time things were going down in "The Isles" in the 16th Century.

The latest "take" on the saga is based on historian John Guy's book "My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots" and it, judging by the film based on it—the latest Mary, Queen of Scots—seems to want it both ways, emphasizing more of what the women had in common than in what separated them.

They may have had their differences but but both shared uneasy paths due to their sex. Henry VIII (Elizabeth's father by Anne Boleyn, wife #2) had only one male heir, (by Jane Seymour, wife #3)—who would become King Edward VI at the age of nine(!)—and the older half-sisters Mary (by Catherine of Aragon, wife #1) and Elizabeth—due to Henry's many wives and his way of dealing with the Church to attain them—were considered, by decree, illegitimate. Edward died at the age of 25 and named the Lady Jane Grey, the daughter of Henry VIII's sister, his successor. The reason? Mary was a Roman Catholic, and Henry and Edward had spent a lot of time and effort getting out from underneath the Pope's robes to go back to The Church. Lady Jane didn't last long, Mary claimed the throne and lasted five years trying to return Catholicism to the primary faith, and was succeeded by Elizabeth, who didn't like it and reversed it.

Now, bear with me here: Mary was the daughter of King James V of Scotland, the son of James IV and Mary Tudor, who was Henry VIII's sister, thus making Mary and Elizabeth cousins (I'll give you a moment...). James V died when Mary (Queen of Scots, his daughter) was six days old and she—at that age—became Queen of Scotland.* There weren't many things she could do regally at that age, of course, so the leadership of Scotland was done by regents, all male and all probably bitter that their Queen was a baby. A female baby, at that. Anyway, Henry VIII's finagling caused a lot of trouble for his relations' when they got to The Big Chair. For both Mary and Elizabeth, the toughest part of their job was being the female rulers of men. The monarchy has always had a history of men in the shadow of the throne trying to thrown their own shade, and Mary and Elizabeth both had to deal with leading reluctant dance-partners, who wanted to decide the moves themselves.

Josie Rourke's film details the issues that Mary Stuart (played here by Saorise Ronan) had to contend with—a viable claim to England's throne, her Catholic faith when England had turned Protestant (after flirting again with Catholicism), recent widowhood and the desire for an heir apparent. Her probably too-quick decision to marry a cousin, Henry Darnley (Jack Lowden) who was not only a drunkard, a would-be usurper of the crown, but also gay (or at least bi-sexual), creating in one nuclear family, all the larger issues she had to deal with. Her regents resented her forthrightness, her taking her own counsel rather than theirs, her alignment with the Pope rather than a devotion to Christ, and her own ambitions to be Queen of England, not just Scotland.  

Her marriage to Darnley did produce one heir, James (who did ascend to the throne after Elizabeth's death), but men were only too willing to take her as wife to try to take her authority as Queen away from her. 

Watching Mary's trials and tribulations across the way must have had a large influence on Elizabeth (played by Margot Robbie), who, famously, never married—was it due to a fear that her authority would be usurped?—and adapted a stance that, given the wrangling among the roosters of her own court, she had to adapt a male attitude id she was to maintain her authority. She had been denied the throne once, and incarcerated for part of that time, so she knew how quickly fortunes could change, even without mis-steps that might hasten it. It was the very nature of Nature, being a part of the Empire's rule of succession.

The movie traces both women's struggles to keep power in a male-dominated world, while they also eyed each other across the way, admiringly but acquisitively, each seeing the threat the other poses. They posture and correspond, their meanings hidden between the lines of their prose. Being cousins, and female, they take more diplomatic means rather than direct words and actions than they do against their male challengers.

It is inevitable (at least, in the movies) that they meet, although they never did in real life. And Rourke stages it obliquely—Mary travels to England for safe-keeping, as she's under threat from her own people—and, in a plain laundry-house, they hold a conversation through layers of hanging sheets (metaphors, anyone?), Mary moving them, Elizabeth cloaked, hiding behind them, until the veils are removed and the conversation becomes more direct and revealing, with Elizabeth summing up Mary thus: "Beauty—bravery—motherhood—you seem to have surpassed me in every way (but) your gifts are your downfall.

And Mary spits out the threat: "Should you murder me, remember—you murder your sister and you murder your Queen."

If you know history, you know how THAT turned out.

Rourke's film is sumptuous in location-work, costumes and hair and make-up—it takes quite a bit of masterful work to make Margot Robbie look unattractive—and the performances are incredibly detailed and lived in (it's also quite fun to see David Tennant play a villain, but he has a lot of company among the Scottish characters).

One appreciates all the work involved, but Mary, Queen of Scots feels a bit stale, despite raunching it up with a couple sex scenes that feel unnecessary. The film opens up a bit when Mary and Elizabeth are not embroiled in fights with the conniving men in their lives, showing them at peace with themselves and with others. It's in those places where Mary, Queen of Scots feels best. One must assume that the two queens would agree—that their jobs would be so much easier without men.

"England does not look so different from Scotland."
"Aye, they are sisters..."

* It is probably at this time that you're thinking the American idea of democracy and voting for your country's leader might not be a bad idea, despite recent turns of events.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur, 2007) Like its 1998 predecessor, Elizabeth, The Golden Age is sumptuously produced, ornate in both costuming and production design, but also in filming and conceptual work. It is one of the most beautiful films I've seen in a longish time—excepting the sequences of torture and carnage—but the material feels a bit shallow (if not altogether juggled, shuffled and finagled*), like one of those bio-pic's that attempt to tell a tumultuous life in 90 minutes; no one likes to have their life, especially a Queenly one, summed up in Cliffs Notes.

"When last we left" Elizabeth I, she had ascended the throne, unmarried and without heir, but unbowed as "The Virgin Queen." Catholics to the right of her, Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) to the left of her, and a seemingly endless line of suitors brought before her. No one has her back except her adviser Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush returning to the role) and lady in waiting Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish).

But there's one angle overlooked, although director Kapur has it covered with a dizzying number of overhead shots. Since the issue in The Golden Age boils down to whose side is God on—between the Protestant England and the Catholic Spain—a lot of time is spent from His point of view.**
Kapur, who started his career in Bollywood, uses color more imaginatively than most current directors (rather than embracing the current trend of leeching the color from films, he adheres to using it as another communicative tool). At the end of Elizabeth the audience was confronted with Elizabeth "the Virgin Queen" symbolized in all her alabaster glory. We see that same white Queen often in The Golden Age but are also confronted with different aspects of Elizabeth. Here, with the issue of finding a proper husband and the potential of an heir, she is frequently seen behind closed doors in far rosier tones than the alabaster appearance—"the divine here on Earth," in the words of Walsingham—that she uses for regal functions. She tells the Archduke Charles, a negligible suitor: "I have a secret, my dear. I pretend there's a pane of glass between me and them. They can see me, but they cannot touch me."

In times of regal impartiality, that "pane of glass" informs itself as the color blue in Kapur's direction. It sets Elizabeth apart and keeps her coolly disengaged and formal, as in the scene below, her she visits her former suitor, Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), and wife, her former lady-in-waiting to bestow her blessing on their first-born. The rest of the room, in slightly gloomy but warm colors, are off-set by her glowing in a frosty light.
And here, leaving the death-bed of a trusted adviser, she shows no emotion as Queen, allowing the man to know that he can die in peace, his work preserving her Monarchy—and her—is done.
The shot is also centered and composed like a Baroque painting, with many tableau layered in three-dimensions within it, each with their own lighting scheme. Kapur and his production designers fill the movie with such images (when the camera isn't flitting from one side of the room to the other), especially in the climactic sea-battle where some of the battle sequences look like they could have been copied from the cover of a Patrick O'Brian novel.
Ultimately, the cold blues and alabasters give way to "the golden age," and Elizabeth is bathed in a warm glowing sunlight, holding the child of Raleigh and Bess—her position of Queen finally legitimized in reality and defended in battle—and the child that might have been hers, a subject—part of her charge, with no man her master and all of England under her protection.

* The Wikipedia entry on "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" has a nice run-down of the shuffling of events in the Queen's reign. One wonders if they'll be more accurate in the inevitable sequel—after all, we haven't seen Essex yet.

** Before I get e-mails from the indignant, we'll use the paternalistic designation...because the participants of the film did.

Glass (2019)

Unsplittable
or
"I Mean, I Say 'I Made You' You Gotta Say 'You Made Me.' I Mean, How Childish Can You Get?" ("Et cetera.")

After his first brush with mainstream success, The Sixth Sense—whose word-of-mouth was so strong that it was a box-office sensation despite being released in the same Summer as Stanley Kubrick's last film and the first "Star Wars" film in 16 years—M. Night Shyamalan followed it up with an austere, no less assured contemplation on super-heroes, comic books and fanaticism. That film, Unbreakable, about a man, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), a security guard who has instincts about people he brushes up against, and soon learns (or merely stops denying) that he has strength and invulnerability after being the lone survivor of a devastating train crash.

That accident is one of many disasters engineered by one Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic-book aficionado and art-dealer who suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta—brittle-bone disease—that leaves him vulnerable to breakage, and so seeks his opposite—comics teach us there must be one—a being not susceptible to any injury. He finds him in David, who walks away from the train derailment without a scratch. And Elijah (or as he's been taunted throughout his life as "Mr. Glass") pursues David to fulfill his destiny.

A great movie. A "super-hero" movie without the spandex or the primary colors. But, the studio that released it (Touchstone, a division of Disney) wanted nothing to do with any mention of "superheroes"—this was the same year as the first X-Men film and superheroes in films had a tendency to start big and fizzle as properties—and promoted it, instead, as a thriller. The film didn't do as well in theaters as The Sixth Sense, but gained a cult following on video. Shyamalan moved on.

Until he had a career resurgence recently with small-budget, restricted-scope movies, the most recent being his Split, which took the kidnap victim angle of horror movies and spliced it with a psychological angle where the abductor, Kevin Wendell Crumb (played brilliantly by James McAvoy) has 23 distinct personalities...and a 24th one of extreme rage and strength. A little story about the lasting devastation of abuse, it shared Unbreakable's fascination with humans with greater potential than the rest of us "sleepers"...and it had a coda which featured the reappearance of Willis' David Dunn. It had everything but a "To Be Continued" card. 

So, there was a lot of anticipation when it was announced that Night's next film would be a combination-sequel to both Unbreakable and Split. And that's always dangerous. Fans start making their own movies in their head and anticipate—it's an inherent social downside with sequels. That movie—Glass—will not meet anybody's expectations (with the exception of bringing back the characters and the actors who portrayed them) as, after a promising start, it then ham-strings nearly all the characters involved leading to a "showdown" that nobody will be too happy with. 

But, at least it has an ending. That's rather novel these days.

It's 19 years after the events of Unbreakable (and a limited amount of time after Split). David Dunn is no longer a security guard at a University in Philadelphia. He runs a security business—and does a little "freelance patrolling" on the side. You can't be a hooded vigilante in a town without gaining a reputation, even if nobody gets a good shot of you on social media, and David has acquired many names, such as "The Tip-Toe Man" and "The Float" (ironic as David's weakness is water—everybody's weakness in Night's movies seems to be water), but the one that sticks is "The Overseer." His son Joseph (played once again by Spencer Treat Clark) helps run the store as he also serves as David's combination Alfred and Oracle, tracking events from...well, you can't call it "The Batcave" so call it "The Storeroom," because that's what it is.

After David stops a pair of "Youtubruisers" for attacking people on the street, David turns his attention to the recent abduction of four cheerleaders, who police have been searching for (Joseph also informs him that the police are also looking for him "pretty aggressively"). Joseph gives him some coordinates to search and, sure enough, David bumps (literally) into Kevin skipping down the street in his 8-year-old "Hedwig" personality and sees the girls in his mind. A little cross-checking and he frees them.

But, Kevin shows up as "The Beast" and Dunn and battle briefly before "The Overseer" gains the upper-hand by tossing both of them out a window. At which point, bright lights come up and the two are cornered by weapons-drawing police and the person of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who tells them that they must surrender or they will be killed—which is questionable as David is invulnerable and "The Beast" has proven unsusceptible to bullets. They are transported to a psychiatric facility called Raven Hill Memorial Hospital, a low-maintenance security building that for 19 years has been the residence of (Dunn! Dunn! Dunn!) one Elijah Price—"Mr. Glass." How damned convenient. 

Not that the place isn't well-prepared: Elijah has been heavily sedated during the whole time into a nearly catatonic state (Jackson does some nice eye-twitching here); Kevin is put in a cell where, should he manifest "The Beast" bright lights will flash him into one of his other personalities (the other way is by saying his full name) not unlike clicking "next" on a blog-site; David is placed in a cell that is festooned with high-pressure hoses to render him helpless (Elijah I can understand, but how does Dr. Staple know that these are the latter two's weaknesses, hmm?)

It is at this point that anyone's expectations will be derailed. Instead of creating a Shyamalaniverse version of "When Titans Clash!" (the Marvel Comics trope), it's more like "When Titans Sit and Stew." Not necessarily a bad thing; one of the charms of Unbreakable was circumventing standard comic book cliches and draining the melodrama out of them, and one must acknowledge that Glass is doing the same thing while teasing us that there will be something more.

SPOILER ALERT: There won't be. 

Staples may know more than she lets on (if her knowledge of their weaknesses wasn't clue enough), but her techniques indicate that she might not; Elijah, Kevin, and David are wheeled into a room for group counseling sessions—together?—where she tries to convince the three that their abilities are only in their minds, as "delusions of grandeur" (the immediate thought burbles up: She don't know them very well, do she?). It seems a pointless and hopeless exercise—these guys have demonstrated powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men (well, except for Elijah, since he's just crazy in a six-panel-per-page kind of way). Kevin's manifestations are well-documented, and his abilities as "The Beast" have left substantial evidence of chewed bodies, bent bars and crushed torsos. David has been leaving forensic evidence (as well as fractured skulls and rough justice) for 19 years. So, why would this "expert" try to convince them that it's all in their minds?

One can only conclude that she doesn't, and that sets up one of the moribund "twists" of the movie. What she doesn't count on, however, is Elijah's scheming mind. He's been faking his vegetative state (but not too well—he gets caught a couple times) and replacing his meds with aspirin (they don't do blood tests at this hospital?) and has in his mind a plan. To Elijah, the only thing the hospital is doing keeping the abilities walking around us secret, and it his intention to bring everyone into the light of day and expose the super-humans to the world.

For that, he needs an ally, and he turns to Kevin for the muscle behind the idea. "Time for the bad guys to team up," he tells Kevin after using his light-guards to bring out "The Beast," telling him that he will have a chance against "the strong man" kept in the cell across from him, and radio's David that he will release "The Beast" to create an unprecedented disaster at a just-opening high-rise in Philadelphia...if only David can break out of his cell.

That's where I'll stop spoiling, but the spoils are in the plot rather than in my revealing of it. It seems the big deal of the story—for all concerned—is whether "the world" should know that there are "super-heroes" among us, and whether it should be suppressed or not. Yet, David has been doing his "patrols" for over 19 years. The press is all over the story about Kevin having DID, including the existence of "The Beast." So, why the big deal? Seems like the super-powered cat is out of the bag already. This tends to make the central theme of the film that Night is going on and on about absolutely meaningless. Yet, the film keeps emphasizing the point when any perspective would show that it was already a fait accompli.

There are other things—details—that don't strike one as being credible (super-heroes are?). For example, the surviving hostage from Split, Casey (the rather alien-looking Anya Taylor-Joy) is thrown into the mix. It seems she's capable of extricating the original Kevin personality from what he refers to as "The Horde," the multitude of personalities that keep him functioning and suppress him from actively killing himself. It's only been a short time since she's escaped that nightmare—and the one that she was sent back to after the film's events—and one would think that she would be a bit reluctant to revisit and show compassion for the monster that was threatening to kill her from the previous film. But, she is used as an example of "the healing power of love and compassion" to Dr. Staples, which, after the movie is over, will make you realize it's something of a red herring, psuedo-mysticism posing as psuedo-psychiatry.

Which is all very well and good, as the story has a psuedo-climax, one that will probably piss off fans of both films. Let's just say that everybody has a weakness hidden among their strengths and they are exploited in this film that has some strengths hidden in its general weakness. For me, it left the same feeling of being snookered that the two volumes of Kill Bill did, when the four hours of katana-porn ended with a bogus lecture on the nature of Clark Kent and a poke in the chest.* Glass left me feeling less than half-empty, as it is much less than the sums of the parts of two very good movies.

* Is there an intellectual form of seppuku? Because after Kill Bill, I would have used it.

Don't Make a Scene: Airplane!

The Story:  Lots of reasons why I wanted to include this scene from Airplane! when I first presented this some years ago: It had been voted into the National Film Registry at the end of that year; Barbara Billingsley, otherwise known as Mrs. Cleaver from the "Leave it To Beaver" television show, had died at the end of that year, and this scene loomed large in her legend. No doubt, her earlier role figured in her being chosen for this (I can't think of a funnier person, other than the ubiquitous Betty White, to make the line "I speak jive" ring with wholesome comic brilliance), and the Zucker Brothers have a fetish for all things "Beaver;" I love Airplane! in the same way I love Buster Keaton, Chuck Jones and Daffy Duck (especially together), a soupçon of Jerry Lewis, and slapstick. Ardently, and every viewing seems fresh...as opposed to the in-flight meals that start the complications of this whole thing.

You look at the screenplay posted on-line, and what the Jive-Talkers are saying is gibberish, the ZAZ team couldn't speak jive for any reason (they're also referred to as "Black Dudes, but in the on-set transcript they're "Jivemen"), so the dialogue was ad-libbed by the two actors (Norman Alexander Gibbs and Al White) on set. Obviously, they wrote Barbara Billinsley's lines, as well. Some unsung trivia there, for the scene and talk (in it's previous sub-titled conversation) are brilliantly hilarious. 

What's always made this scene funny for me, besides Billingsley's showing up, and the rather nicely rhythmed "jive" being spoken, was the basic joke that understanding a language doesn't always promote understanding. In fact, there is more mis-understanding (it seems) the more you learn; one has to be immersed in the culture to learn the idioms, the slang, the colloguialisms, the provincialisms, the emphases, and vernacular.

And if you look on a color wheel, the opposite of black is Barbara Billingsley.

The Set-Up:  Set-up?  The set-ups only last long enough to deliver the punch-lines. 

Anyone who had "the fish" for dinner on board the flight from Los Angeles to Chicago is getting violently ill, including the entire flight crew, save the stewardesses.

But, that's not important right now....

Action!

INT. PASSENGER CABIN - NIGHT
A Black Dude is holding his stomach in pain.

JIVEMAN 1: Mnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Randy approaches.

RANDY: Can I get you something?

JIVEMAN 1:  S'mo fo butter layin' me to the bone. Jackin' me up. Tightly.
RANDY: I'm sorry. I don't understand.
MRS. SCHIFF, a middle-aged woman, is seated behind the Black Dudes.

JIVEMAN 2: Cutty say he cant hang.

MRS. SCHIFF: Oh, stewardess, I speak jive.
RANDY: Ohhhh, good. 

MRS. SCHIFF: He said he's in great pain and wants to know if you can help him.

RANDY: Would you tell him to just relax and I'll be back as
soon as I can with some medicine.
Randy exits.

MRS. SCHIFF: Jus' hang loose, blood.

MRS. SCHIFF: She goonna catch you up on the`rebound on de med-cide.

BLACK DUDE (indignantly): What it is, big mamma. My mamma didn't raise no dummy, I dug her rap.

MRS. SCHIFF: Cut me some slack, jack!

They engage in an argument in jive talk, with Mrs. Schiff getting the best of it.

MRS. SCHIFF: Chump don' wan' no help, chump don' git no help.

MRS. SCHIFF: Jive-ass dude don' got no brains, anyhow.

Airplane!

Words by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker

Pictures by Joseph F. Biroc and  Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker

Airplane! is available on DVD from Paramount Home Video.