★★★★☆
A potentially glum historical narrative about the repeated betrayals of Mary Queen of Scots is brought thrillingly to life in this rousing political melodrama about the contrasting fates of two very different queens. Saoirse Ronan is on savagely strong form as Mary Stuart, the eponymous heroine who, as the film begins (in 1561) has returned from Europe with flawless French, some progressive ideas (she believes in freedom of religious expression and in fluid sexual identities) and a claim to the thrones of both Scotland and England.
Ronan is an actress who is sometimes too precise, too machine-tooled (see On Chesil Beach), but here she dominates the screen from the start, eyes ablaze with fervour, face luminescent with self-belief. With an early life of Catholic French experience already behind her (as a former queen consort of France), Mary wants to bring some canny European liberation to stuffy Protestant Britain. The film’s script, by the American House of Cards screenwriter Beau Willimon, will, at the very least, be eerily au courant for Brexit-era audiences.
Mary’s royal ambitions, naturally, ruffle the feathers of her distant cousin, Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie, in another utterly fearless turn after I, Tonya). And so the action of the movie unfolds as a dance of sorts, an exchange between the two queens, sometimes in letters, more often in political manoeuvring, as each of them aims for complete supremacy while negotiating with the slippery and treacherous male advisers who surround them.
It sounds dry and procedural, and there are perhaps one too many “walkie-talkie” sequences (like those famous corridor set-pieces from The West Wing, but here in the Scottish Highlands) yet, in her debut as a director, Josie Rourke (the outgoing artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in London) litters the film with ingenious formal devices that revive any flagging attentions. She cross-cuts between Mary and Elizabeth with delicious aplomb. Cutting between the postpartum Mary, for instance, and the desolate, isolated Elizabeth (both are in the same position, one stained with afterbirth, the other with paper flowers) is heartbreaking. Rourke lights the film’s many shadow-filled interiors like a Dutch master and she delights in depicting small, throwaway, yet intriguing narrative vignettes, such as the moment when Elizabeth’s four fearsome ladies-in-waiting clear an entire hall of butch and sweaty male fencers with screams and shouts of, “Out! Out! Out!”
Rourke’s greatest achievement is the performances she’s coaxed out of her two lead actresses. They’re so good they’re like De Niro and Pacino in Heat. And when they meet, finally, and the sparks fly, it’s like, well, De Niro and Pacino in Heat. But with less posturing and more tears. And much more soul.
Released in the UK on January 18