Evangelicals Now
Christian news worldwide
magnifying glass Search archives
home Home check the archives Archives Subscribe Subscriptions Advertising Information & booking of classifieds Adverts Find a local evangelical Church Find a church for the search engines and extremely curious! About us Contact us Site Map
Printable
Version

Elizabeth

Elizabeth
Cert. 15
Director: Shekhar Kapur

You could watch this film merely as a political thriller dressed in doublet and hose, but as a Christian, if you do, you've been taken in.
A young and vulnerable woman ascends the throne in a time of religious controversy, low morals and political instability. The nation is divided, ill-defended and far from prosperous economically. The film depicts the unseemly scrabble for power behind the throne. There are plots and counter-plots, alliances and misalliances, lies and dissembling.
No wonder Elizabeth I is confused; so is the audience. She plays one suitor off against another, and finally literally cuts off all this wrangling and scheming in a bloody purge. She survives to reign supreme over a golden age of which she becomes quite deliberately the figurehead, thus uniting a divided nation.
Most of the characters in this film are pretty unlikeable - from smooth, double-tongued Dudley, to the sinister Walsingham, to whom slitting throats comes as easily as drinking his morning cup of coffee. There are gorgeous court scenes and the actors are eminent and excellent, but this is a brutal and frequently gruesome spectacle. While it was, no doubt, the director's intention to remind us that the latter years of the 16th century were desperate times, the torturings and executions seem particularly gratuitous in view of the fact that they are portrayed as exercises in cynical expediency. It is Foxe's Book of Martyrs without the truth for which the martyrs died.
As history, it is at least a little questionable; its interpretation of history is feminist and post-modern, as you might expect. Truth is marginalised, morality is irrelevant and pragmatism rules. In the end, Walsingham advises Elizabeth that, robbed of their matriology, the nation needs a new mediator, a madonna. So Elizabeth daubs her face with white, dresses up like a grotesque puppet and becomes the Virgin Queen to replace the Virgin Mary in the people's affections. This, according to the film, was the secret of her success as a monarch. The story of the Reformation and its impact on all levels of British life and culture is being rewritten before our eyes.

Esme Shirt

A reader rang during production of this issue of EN to ask if we were going to review this film. He said he very much hoped that we would, as he was very worried about its rewriting of history. He mentioned that he had heard that a great deal of the money for making the film had been supplied by the EU.