The Favourite (2018, Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos):
Nothing screams “Oscar bait” quite like a British-produced historical drama, and a glance at the synopsis of The Favourite — lovers and politicians vie for control of England in the early eighteenth century, mainly by vying for the attentions of its ruler, the idiosyncratic, sickly Queen Anne — suggests we’ll be getting the usual period pomp and pageantry. But look closely at the credits and you’ll notice the presence of director Yorgos Lanthimos, best known for the very offbeat, very weird The Lobster (2015). Still, countless other indie directors with unique visions have been chewed up and spat out by mainstream movie machinery. Would The Favourite be any different?
The answer comes within the film’s first five minutes, wherein we happen upon an absurd duck race held in a palace stateroom, the blue bloods at the event frothing like football hooligans, wigs piled high on their heads, faces powdered up like kabuki clowns. This is no place for royal comportment, and indeed, when Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) appears on the scene, the first words uttered straight to her face are, “You look like a badger.” Later, we’ll witness sights such as a courtly roundelay suddenly veering into breakdance moves, a fat naked man getting pelted with oranges, and copious amounts of puke belched into dainty pots — and the puke is nothing compared to the bile and knavery each character carries in her heart. Your father’s Masterpiece Theatre, this movie ain’t.
But as the rollicking The Favourite unfolds, it reveals itself to be the latest in another hallowed, proud film genre: the comedy of manners (mostly bad) and back-stabbing bitchery. The central battle concerns Anne’s most trusted confidante (and lover) Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), the only person alive with the guts and cache to call Anne a badger, and Sarah’s seemingly simple cousin Abagail (Emma Stone). Her once-aristocratic family having fallen on hard times, Abagail needs employment, and literally flops into the queen’s court, mottled with mud and armed only with gumption and guile. At first Sarah is dismissive of her kin (“A monster for the children to play with, perhaps?” she muses), but decides to give her a job in the scullery, and once Abagail sets eyes on needy, fragile Queen Anne, she recognizes an opportunity to win favor (not to mention a nice piece of land and financial endowment). Let the games commence!
Employing skittery cuts and fish-eye lens, Lanthimos leans into the carnivalesque atmosphere of it all. For every Stuart-era period detail lovingly captured by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, there’s a startling anachronism in the banter, or a butting of heads on the soundtrack, where genteel classical songs joust with Johnnie Burn’s astringent, ominous interludes. Still, Lanthimos also knows when to lay back and let his leads do their thing, especially when Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara’s script goes potty-mouthed in deliciously literate ways. “I will need to act in a way that meets with the edges of my morality,” Abgail resolves. “And when I end up on the street selling my asshole to syphilitic soldiers, steadfast morality will be a fucking nonsense that will mock me daily.” The role is a perfect change of pace for Stone, who was in danger of getting typecast as the quirky, winsome heroine. There has always been an element of willfulness in her performances, and here that willfulness curdles into calculation, where a look of innocence is crafted just as carefully as the sweet talk that eventually lands her in Anne’s bed.
Stone is matched nearly every step of the way by Weisz, who revels in her power like a snake coldly constricting around its prey. Sensing Abagail as a mortal enemy, she points her pistol right at her whilst shooting pigeons: “Sometimes, it is hard to remember whether you have loaded the pellet or not,” she says airily. “I do fear confusion and accidents.” Compared to these women, the men in the story are merely impotent schemers such as Nicholas Hoult’s primped-up Lord Harley (Sarah dismisses him with barely an effort: “Your mascara is running”), or pretty boy toys like Joe Alwyn’s Lord Masham, who Abagail uses as a stepping stone to respectability. “Have you come to seduce me or rape me?” she taunts him. “I am a gentleman,” he replies. “So rape, then,” she concludes.
Lady Sarah: Did you not hear what I said?
Queen Anne: Yes, you regard her as a liar and a thief.
Lady Sarah: Yes.
Queen Anne: I do not, obviously.
Lady Sarah: You will dismiss her.
Queen Anne: I don’t want to. I like it when she puts her tongue inside me.
Enjoyable as these performances are, they still take a back seat to Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne. Frail, querluous, wheedling, forever vacillant, she is as sneakily manipulative as the best of them, yet Colman’s interpretation makes every eccentricity and outburst seem like an eruption from the unconscious. Whether fainting from the horror of making an unpopular declaration in court, overdosing on cake, or going all aquiver at the prospect of love, she finds the tragedy as well as the ridiculousness within the role. While the story plays fast and loose with history (the film neglects to mention that Harley and Abagail were real-life cousins, or that Anne actually had a husband, for example), Colman has too grand a time masticating her dialogue for accuracy to matter overmuch.
Suffice to say that things don’t turn out as planned for any of the principals, and after the low laughs and high dudgeon, Lanthimos guides the narrative to a conclusion that turns out to be the most forlorn, tragic exploration of lesbian love and revenge since David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. Lanthimos overplays his hand only once: in keeping with his obsessions with animals, the central motif of the movie turns out to be a horde of rabbits that Anne keeps on hand (and which we’re told symbolize the seventeen children she lost in childbirth). By the time we reach the film’s languorous yet frenzied final images, those same rabbits smother the frame, in simultaneous superimposed images. In love, it seems, there are no winners or losers, just bunnies. It’s what you would expect from the director of The Lobster, but it rings jarringly off key compared to the controlled chaos of the rest of the production. Still, in its bracing refusal to play by the usual cliches, The Favourite is an unconventional sundae of a movie, with Colman’s performance the royal cherry on top.
