Delayed Reaction: Elizabeth

Premise: The story of the early years of Elizabeth I's reign.

When you mention the 1998 Oscars* to any Oscar historian, the first thing that comes to mind is how Harvey Weinstein and Miramax pulled off an Oscar stunner, maneuvering Shakespeare in Love to beat presumptive favorite Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture. Books and oral histories have been written on this topic. It's endlessly fascinating to people like me.

*The ceremony in 1999 for the films of 1998.

What's often lost in the discussion is the other nominees that year. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Shakespeare in Love's victory is that it won Best Picture despite there being another Best Picture nominee set in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. In fact, each movie had an actress playing Elizabeth who was nominated for an Oscar. Hell, they both had Joseph Fiennes as love interests of the female leads. One would expect that kind of overlap to cause vote splitting, but Shakespeare in Love won despite that. Then again, Saving Private Ryan wasn't the only WWII battle epic with a staggeringly deep ensemble that was nominated for Best Picture. The Thin Red Line was also nominated. A third WWII movie was the fifth nominee: Life is Beautiful. I'd wager that when most people think reductively about what "an Oscar movie" or "Oscar bait" is, they are thinking of the 1998 Oscar season. That year, it really was all Elizabethan costume dramas and WWII. It's a dated impression though. Neither kind of film has actually won Best Picture since then. Few have even broken through to be nominated. This was either the last hurrah of the classic "Oscar bait" or the moment when they Academy realized they went too far.

All of this has relegated Elizabeth to being a footnote in another movie's Oscar season. But it's pretty interesting on its own. It's the movie that announced Cate Blanchett to the world. It's also one of the stranger movies to get a sequel. Not that Elizabeth's reign didn't have plenty of chapters that warrant another film. You just don't see a lot of historical dramas with Oscar credentials getting follow-ups. If nothing else, the stars or filmmakers tend to not want to repeat themselves.

Elizabeth falls into the same "trap" as a lot of historical dramas. It tends to assume the audience is better-versed in the period than it probably is. There are many parts of this movie that I mainly followed because I learned about it in other movies or from school. If you are anything less than locked-in, there's a lot that can easily be missed. That's the better choice than spoon-feeding everything to the audience. It would be nice to find a middle ground though. This is a good reminder that what most people call "stuffy" is really just dense.

I did find the movie a bit dull though. I imagine the movie with anyone other than Blanchett in the lead role and it's a slog. The romance between Elizabeth and Joseph Fiennes' character goes nowhere. Daniel Craig as a murder priest veers into being just silly. I never fully understood the nature of Christopher Eccleston's Thomas Howard as a threat. It really all falls on Blanchett to sell the gravity of the different story beats.

Thankfully, Cate Blanchett is on the shortlist of our finest living actors and can make even the driest scenes engaging. At the end of the day, the biggest problem with Elizabeth is that it feels like there's a dozen better movies to watch for that time period or that tone.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend