Helen Mirren’s take on Elizabeth I proves a hefty but watchable series
“The enemy of the monarch is the over-mighty subject”
2005 saw Helen Mirren take on Elizabeth II in The Queen but also her namesake Elizabeth I in a Channel 4 miniseries, joining the list of iconic actresses who have portrayed Gloriana. Elizabeth is split into two distinct parts, each focusing on the romantic attachment of the time rather than the major events of her reign, so the opening two hour segment kicks in the final year of her relationship with the Earl of Leicester and the second turns its gaze onto the Earl of Essex. It’s an interesting take on the queen, Elizabeth as doomed romantic heroine, but one which feels problematic at times as it challenges our pre-conceived notions of this monarch.
Starting 20 years into her reign at which point her lack of marriage and issue were long debated, Nigel Williams’ script is forced to set the scene as if this were brand new so that the audience can catch up. So a long time is spent establishing her as a light spirit, emotionally – almost frivolously – concerned with matters of the heart and womb, with little sense of the monarch that she has already been for two decades. There’s a certain naiveté, which Mirren does play beautifully, that feels somehow wrong, modern attitudes imposed on Elizabethan times and jarring. That said, her early interactions with Jeremy Irons’ Leicester as a playful lover are lovely to behold.
When the seriousness comes, after a particularly heinous plot against her life led by Barbara Flynn’s sickly Mary Queen of Scots, the whirl of politics seizes all in its grip and the action does become more historically based. The men of her court – Ian McDiarmid, Patrick Malahide and latterly Toby Jones – are all sagely tolerant of her inimitable style of ruling, especially in later years when her preference for the buff charms of Hugh Dancy’s silver-tongued Essex led her to promote him beyond his station and his dreams, and the whole thing feels much more convincing when Elizabeth is raging against the advancing years as opposed to the emptiness of her marital bed.
Mirren’s complex portrayal of the queen may not necessarily go down in many people’s top 5 I would have thought, but it is still strong, especially given the excellent production values of Tom Hooper’s work. But the thing that lingers most in the mind is the viscerally brutal scenes of torture – decapitation, disembowelment, racking, none of the gory details are spared as enemies are treated with an increasingly firm grip. At nearly four hours, this is somewhat of an indulgent series, good rather than excellent but worth a watch on a rainy Sunday.
