Queen Anne gave her name to a gracefully curved style of furniture. Her 12-year reign is otherwise little remembered. Although the 18th-century monarch left only a slight legacy, The Favourite finds interest in her story. In the latest film by provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, Anne (Olivia Colman) is at the center of vicious courtly and sexual intrigues, only some of it provoked by men. Anne governs Great Britain largely on the advice of two women, first from Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and then from Abigail Hill (Emma Stone).
Deborah Davis’ tart screenplay puts the men in second place. Even Britain’s leading politicians, Sarah’s flustered husband, the Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss) and his scheming foe, the foppish Harley (Nicholas Hoult), must work their wiles through the women. Anne is played as neurotic and vacillating, uncertain of herself and needing a strong guiding hand. There is neither king nor prince consort. None of her many children survived childhood in a world where even royalty was prey to high infant mortality. Tough-minded Sarah acts as gatekeeper and wife-in-charge, caring for the hobbled and gouty queen, ordering the palace routine, controlling access to the monarch and dictating state policy. Anne is depicted—perhaps unfairly—as knowing little about her country’s war with France, a wasteful conflict encouraged by the Marlboroughs and opposed by Harley.
Abigail enters the picture on a crowded carriage rattling down the rutted road to the palace. She is Sarah’s cousin from a fallen branch of gentlefolk and arrives for her job interview splattered with horse dung and haloed with flies. “Friends of yours?” Sarah quips. Although given the lowest job as a scullery maid, Abigail makes herself useful by preparing a soothing herbal salve for Anne’s painful gout. It’s a step up the ladder, and Abigail proves to be an agile climber.
Lanthimos shoots many scenes from askew angles or with concave or convex lenses to suggest the warped shape of 18th-century society. The settings contrast the poor servant class, confined to cramped and dingy spaces, with their masters, gliding across polished floors through gilded caverns of consumption. The poor have low ceilings. The rich have roofs that touch the sky.
Political rivalry plays out in the darkness of the candlelit palace and its torchlit grounds. Britain is no longer an absolute monarchy but the parliamentary system is still teething. Matters of state are conducted by ministers huddled around the queen’s sick bed. Representing the rising urban merchant class, the Marlboroughs want war and tax hikes to pay for it. Standing for the landed gentry, Harley is against war and taxes and wants Abigail as his spy. He thinks nothing of knocking her into a ditch to display his power over her. Then again, Sarah threatens her with a pistol. Abigail begins the story as a relative innocent but in the end, no one is good.
The Favourite is a lavishly staged satire on the age of powdered wigs (Whigs?) with dialogue that lashes like a serpent’s tongue. Although falsely marketed as comedy, The Favourite is more a tragedy about power and what lack of power can mean in an unjust society where everyone is allowed—even encouraged—to torment the less fortunate.
Listen to David Luhrssen discuss The Favourite with Lake Effect’s Audrey Nowakowski here.
