Butler's Cinema Scene

Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz

“THE FAVOURITE”  My rating: B

119 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Deliciously nasty and morally ambiguous, “The Favourite” is a female-centric slice of history featuring three superb actresses duking it out on screen.

In addition, it may be remembered as Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ most accessible film. Which is not to say that it’s breezy moviegoing.

As was so obvious with his most recent English-language features — “The Lobster” and “The Killing of the Sacred Deer” — Lanthimos marches to his own weird drummer. The difference this time around is that instead of working from his own script he’s tackling a screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, and their reasonably conventional approach grounds this yarn in more or less familiar territory.

This feast of power-playing shenanigans is set in the 18th-century court of England’s Queen Anne, a monarch equal parts sadness and silliness.  As played by the great Olivia Colman (for my money this year’s best supporting actress), this ruler is fat, frumpy and flighty.

Small wonder that her childhood friend and now closest confidant, Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), treats the monarch as a sort of overgrown baby with big appetites and a short attention span. Because of their long friendship Sarah can tell Her Highness the brutal truth — for example, that her new cosmetic do-over makes the Queen look like a large badger.  (Sarah actually seems to take pleasure in dissing her hapless royal gal pal.)

In return Anne showers gifts (like castles) on her companion and makes sure that Sarah’s husband Lord Marlborough (Mark Gatiss) spends most of his time away  fighting those nasty Frenchies.

Enter Abigail (Emma Stone), Sarah’s penniless country cousin come to court in the hopes of employment.  She’s put to work in the kitchen, but little by little insinuates herself into the Queen’s household…among other things she whips up an herbal poultice to treat Her Majesty’s gouty feet.

What ensues is a sort of powdered-wig “All About Eve,” with the young interloper cannily inserting herself between the old friends. Abigail  discovers that Anne and Sarah are lovers and decides to use that information for her own advancement. Scheming, backbiting and even a bit of poison are employed.

Emma Stone

Trailers for “The Favourite” proffer it as a rudely witty  comedy.  It is. But viewers should temper their expectations of a laff riot. There’s humor here, certainly, but Lanthimos’ vision is so dark that by the midway point one is less amused than taken aback.

Indeed, Sarah and Abigail are so crassly manipulative and emotionally icy that it’s nearly impossible to warm up to either of them.  The sentiments of most viewers will be with Colman’s Queen, who over the course of the film segues from buffoon to tragic figure.

An example: Anne allows 17 live rabbits to frolic in her bedchamber. Initially this seems like just one more manifestation of her childishness. But when she reveals to Abigail that each rabbit represents one of her pregnancies — that she lost 16 babies through either miscarriage or early death — one has to wonder if Anne’s idiocy isn’t in part an escape from impossibly cruel reality.

The men of the court, meanwhile, are impotent idiots. The competing political foes, Harley (Nicholas Hoult) and Godolphin (James Smith), are largely at the mercy of Anne and her ladies…the former is an archly cynical Machiavellian, while the later never goes anywhere without his beloved duck.

Halfway through Abigail marries a hunky but thick peer (Joe Alwyn), but it’s only her way of angling for political advantage. On his wedding night the lout must make do with a hand job.

The other gentlemen of court are prancing perfumed boobs with the party-hearty outlook of drunken frat boys.

The bones of the film’s plot are firmly rooted in history.  Queen Anne and Lady Sarah were indeed confidants, and Sarah was nudged aside by her younger cousin. Anne was as sickly and silly as she is here depicted.

If the film’s narrative starts to sag in the third act, at least we have Lanthimos’ arresting visual style.  He apparently had full access to a centuries-old castle, and has a high old time with tracking shots down endless wood-paneled corridors.

He also employs wide-angle lenses that allow him to capture three walls of room in a single shot, a visual grabber that offers a cinematic equivalent of the script’s anachronistic blend of Restoration tropes and very modern humor.

That’s reflected as well in the musical score, a blend of period-specific material and some suspenseful percussive compositions that sound a bit like the “Jaws” theme.

in the end audiences won’t be charmed by “The Favourite” so much as they’ll end up wincing at its nastiness. But it’s a good wince.

| Robert W. Butler