Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

Life at court means a life of watching your back as you never know who could stab you – or when, if it equals a chance of currying favor with the Queen.

Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman) is reliant on her friend and confidant the Lady Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) to make all her decisions especially the political ones – much to the frustration of the party who the Lady is against.

Because of this Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult) wants Lady Marlborough out of the Queen’s ear – and he soon finds his chance of ensuring this happens.

Court life is like a never ending game of chess, and when Lady Marlborough’s cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) turns up seeking employment, a new Pawn with ambitions to become a Knight makes her way across the board shaking things up as she goes.

The first shout out for The Favourite has to go to the actresses – Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone. They did a fantastic job of making their respective characters incredibly distinctive which added to giving the world its own flavour.

I don’t know about anyone else but my timeline of history is made up by the shows and movies I’ve watched (Outlander, Hamilton, Les Miserables, Singin’ in the Rain etc.) with that in mind, the movie made a name for the year 1708, carving out a place in my internal timeline.

Characters aside, another stand out feature of this movie was the cinematography, most notably in its use of fisheye, panoramic/wide angle lens’. I couldn’t dissect an tell you the connotations of their uses but it was different and oddly fitting for how the story was told.

Interesting fact Rachel Weisz’s character Lady Marlborough is an ancestor of both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana.

Though there were many visually interesting and dynamic character types, the story itself wasn’t all that interesting or new. You could explain it to someone in under fifteen seconds and a two hour movie was built around it. Because of this I did get a little bored in places.

The ending was wholefully dissatisfying. It just… ended. Sure all the pieces were lined up to give you a broad understanding of what happened when the screen finally faded to black but that really wasn’t enough for me after all that crazy investment. My only solace is that the movie is based on history so I just had a cheeky wiki read to fill in the gap.

You may or may not know that I cannot stand the actor Mark Gatiss. Well he was in this movie (though thankfully not much) and so because of my personal vendetta that’s a negative point for the movie.

I don’t know.

The movie was definitely unique in many ways; cinematography, editing, and characteristics which I’ve applauded already and I can understand how it got all those award nominations. However in terms of personal taste this movie wasn’t for me. The story unfolded too slowly – and was barely a story – and I wanted all the craziness to be worth it in the long run and for me it wasn’t.