Jude Law is a scabrous Henry VIII but Alicia Vikander underwhelms in the misconceived historical fiction that is Firebrand
“You don’t want any harm to come of me?”
I’ve watched a fair bit of revisionist Tudor (and the like) historical TV over the last few months so it is little surprise that films are having a go too. As a result, there’s a lot of shared DNA going around. In covering (part of) the reign of Katherine Parr, Firebrand crosses over with Becoming Elizabeth; with music cues like PJ Harvey’s ‘Down by the Water’, it sits with The Serpent Queen; and in essentially reworking history, it starts down the path of My Lady Jane but pulls its punches in how seriously it takes itself.
Adapted loosely by Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth from Elizabeth Fremantle’s 2013 novel Queen’s Gambit, itself a free interpretation of history, Karim Aïnouz’s film thus posits itself as a contemporary-minded feminist reclamation of Parr’s impressive legacy, away from being “just one word in a stupid rhyme”. But it goes so far in reshaping and indeed rewriting history without any acknowledgement that it is just making things up, and quite possibly undermining what she did achieve by muddling it with this fiction.
Aïnouz is at pains to show us that this is a world of toxic masculinity with an emphaticness I’m not sure is entirely necessary. It is 1544. Henry VIII is on his sixth wife. Some things are a given. His opening gambit pushes things too – acting as Queen Regent while Henry’s off fighting in France, she nips out for a (highly unlikely) clandestine meeting with Anne Askew (a fiery Erin Doherty) a childhood friend and proto-feminist preacher who inspires further thought in Katherine, who then writes books that make her the first woman to be published under her own name in English.
The fly in the ointment here in Henry though, and the court around him which prove a mixed bag in this film. Jude Law is highly effective as a tyrannical monster, in constant pain from a leg wound and with an ego that can’t be stroked enough, his petulance is a powerful driver for the troubled relationship he has with Katherine. The court around them is much less well defined though, with Seymours aplenty with murky intentions offering little narrative clarity, only Simon Russell Beale’s vengeful Bishop Gardiner really cutting through.
Alicia Vikander delivers some strong work as Katherine but feels decidedly too modern for the role (perhaps an intentional choice…) and rarely as compelling as she needs to be to make the case for the status of noted woman of history that the film is angling for. Lazy voiceover work (from a young Princess Elizabeth) points to Katherine’s interventions to secure the line of succession for her stepdaughter but real indignity comes with the film’s final interjection into the history books – Parr deserves better.
