The Favourite

This thing is going to get a lot of awards, because it’s a costume drama, and it’s weird, and it has knock-out performances from Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, but I sat through the whole thing trying to figure out how accurate it was.

Which is missing the point. This is a movie which has a bit in the middle where Tories are pelting a naked man with pomegranates. No explanation is ever offered for this; it’s just something which is happening, and Emma Stone runs around the edge of it, and that’s it. Weird stuff happened in the court of Queen Anne. Maybe they didn’t have TV or Facebook and it was just a matter of passing the time. Or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos is just nuts. That would fit with what I know about his prior art.

Anyhow, sweating the details of whether the Marlborough campaigns were planned and supported that way, or whether the British Prime Minister really was inseparable from his racing duck, is kind of missing the point. The Favourite is a movie about people being selfish and beastly to each other and how little good it does in the end. As I type this I find myself thinking that Yorgos Lanthimos could have done an interesting job of The Death of Stalin. The movie works because the characters pull you in. Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne is pathetic and yet subtly monstrous. Rachel Weisz’ Sarah Churchill is ruthless but somehow the only sane person in the palace, and Emma Stone’s Abigail is whatever she needs to be in the moment if that’s what will get her long term security and a place in society.

They’re all great; not great people, but great characters, and somehow more lively and compelling than the fops which otherwise populate the Court and make the decisions which wind up in the history books. As you watch the cabinet wheel and deal, it’s hard to resist the feeling that Sarah Churchill’s doing the only right thing by browbeating and manipulating them. It’s another one of those movies which reminds you that most decisions in history were made by people who were either drunk or hungover, because until recently, booze was safer to drink than water and no-one had invented aspirin.

Just don’t read the real story, because it will leave you a bit annoyed that the script simplified and telescoped a long game in which the players were even more closely related to each other than the movie suggests.