Walking the Walk

The queen is not amused, but we are: Olivia Colman in The Favourite.

Olivia Colman waddles through the halls of power as Queen Anne in The Favourite like a demented wind-up toy. Suffering from gout and plagued with insecurities, Anne is a feast for any actress (Claire Bloom and Margaret Tyzack have done well by the role in the past). Colman tackles her with a full-on fervor that knocks you out. In her hands, the queen is more than just an assemblage of tics and eccentricities. She's a complex human being, the warped product of a barely mentioned past who probably shouldn't have been put in charge a grocery list much less a country. That's the film's central conceit, however. None of the characters, most of them the beneficiaries of inherited wealth and position, are capable of wielding power effectively. Yet they squabble over it constantly. Even the middle-class Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) — who plots to replace her cousin, Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), in the queen's favor — doesn't know how to handle the power she strives for. It's not that she's a woman; it's that she's human. And the political system depicted seems the opposite of a meritocracy. If anything, it reflects the warped leadership in Washington today — the boobocracy wherein inherited wealth and the right lies suddenly qualify one for the highest offices in the land.

Colman's performance is better than the script she's been given. Screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara make rather a hash of history. Their script ignores recent scholarship that suggests Anne was quite the capable ruler whose reign was highlighted by major developments politically and culturally. Instead, it presents the childish, emotionally unstable Anne of Lady Churchill's memoirs, hardly the most objective account of events, with contemporary sexual rumors spread by her enemies thrown in to sweeten the pot. Their writing is very witty, with some scenes that resemble Harold Pinter's best sketches. The opening, for example, in which Colman tries to get Weisz to help her tend her pet rabbits (one for each miscarriage and lost child), provides a capsule image of the perversions of power that will fill the picture. Just don't mistake anything you're seeing for what really happened. Its their and director Yorgos Lanthimos' vision of the corruptive influence of power — All About Eve (1950) with crowns and cunnilingus.

That strong emphasis on the personal means the political issues get somewhat muddied. Of course, nobody wants to sit still for almost two hours of political theory (unless maybe Errol Morris is directing it), but it would be nice to have a clearer image of who's on which side. From the film, you can't tell that Anne's Lord Treasurer, Sidney Godolphin (James Smith), belongs to the same political party as his chief parliamentary opponent, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult). Nor is there a clear sense of what Godolphin and Lady Churchill's loss of power means to the nation. The imagined personal chaos is placed so firmly center stage that it ends up doing the history an injustice.

While the action is unspooling, however, there's little chance to worry about it. Colman's performance dominates the film, but it's not the whole show. Stone and Weisz more than carry their weight as the dueling cousins. Weisz has the quieter role in many ways, but you can see the need for power in the set of her jaw and her steely eyes. Stone starts out seeming softer. The character's more of a victim at first, abused by a man who lusts after her during her coach ride to the palace and then thrown into work as a scullery maid. With her big, doe eyes, she seems the perfect little martyr. But the actress can pull up a harder side as well. She has a great deal of wit, which works well for her in this film (in the much soppier La La Land in 2016, I kept waiting for her to laugh out loud at some of the script's more ridiculous moments). As the plot progresses, Abigail finds ways to ingratiate herself with the queen. What starts as seeming altruism, preparing herbal remedies for Anne's persistent and painful gout, turns into manipulation as she first seduces the queen and then takes every opportunity to undermine her cousin. Stone limns all of this beautifully. She never gets ahead of herself, so she carries the audience from sympathizing with her to hating her for her manipulations.

Gender politics are a key issue in the film. One of Lanthimos' key choices is to have the women use natural hair and make-up while the men carry over the greatest excesses of the Restoration. They wear large wigs and Hoult, in particular is heavily, made up in the period's "male kewpie doll" look. It's to his credit that he doesn't let the costumes swallow him up (any more than the makeup and special effects did in his X-Men movies). The men who have a more natural look are those outside the power politics. There's a brief shot of Lord Churchill (Mark Gatiss) without a wig after he's been removed from his post, and Lord Masham (Joe Alwyn) is more natural throughout. His character is more of a pawn. He's the stepping-stone for Abigail and Harley's ascent to power, and Alwyn plays his perplexed innocence quite well (you'd hardly recognize him as the same actor who played Lucas Hedges' rapist in this year's Boy Erased). The courtship and wedding night scenes are particularly sharp because he thinks he's won a sexual prize only to find he's just a tool in her hands.

Lanthimos has given the film a rich look. These political shenanigans are carried out in the lap of luxury. But he keeps under-cutting it in an almost Brechtian way. There's a very funny court dance staged by the German choreographer Constanza Macras that mixes elements of contemporary rock and hip-hop performance with period dance. I'm not completely sure of its purpose, but it's a hoot (and very well performed by Weisz and Hoult). Lanthimos also uses wide-angle and fish-eye lenses to create a disorienting effect. At times, that's almost too showy for its own good. It's Brechtian all right. It pulls you out of the story, but I'm not sure if it makes you think about anything expect the director's showing off.

Ultimately, the film doesn't need tricks like that to make its point. Everything it needs to say is there in Colman's performance. Her work has been one of the delights of British television since she made her debut in 1999. Her performance as Simon Doonan's mother in Beautiful People is one of the most fully dimensional comic portraits I've seen. After one episode, you knew Debbie and wanted her as your best friend. As Ellie Miller in Broadchurch, she just about knocks you out of your seat as she tries to navigate her professional and personal spheres. Her Queen Anne embodies everything the script has to say about the vagaries of power while adding a human dimension that grounds the writers' and director's concepts. She can transition from pathetic grotesque to heartbreakingly human in an instant. It's a dazzling accomplishment. Every time you think you've seen everything she has to offer in the role, she comes up with something new.

  Tina Carver tries to anatomize a walking tree monster

as Todd Andrews looks on inexpressively in From Hell It Came.

On the IMDb page for From Hell It Came (1957), the first listing under plot keywords is "bare chested male bondage." "Bare chested male" recurs further down the list, followed by "staked out" and "catfight," among other descriptors, the last being "killer tree," which is what the film is actually about. This suggests one common characteristic of the film's small cult of fans, desperation.

They're going to be pretty frustrated if they watch after the first few minutes. The South Seas horror flick opens with the dead tribal chief's son, Kemo (Gregg Palmer), indulging in a little bare chested male bondage. He's being punished for taking his sick father to see the U.S. scientists stationed on the island. Kemo accuses the medicine man (Robert Swan) and the new chief (Baynes Barron) of poisoning his father, but Kemo's wife (Suzanne Ridgeway) lies to support their accusations. Palmer is the most accomplished actor to speak in the scene, but his impassioned speeches, delivered while he's tied to the ground, are somewhat undermined by the presence of a chicken in the upper right hand corner of the frame insistently pecking at the ground. He's also got the best body in the film, though it's not shown to good advantage while he lies there. Only after his execution, when he's buried propped up in a standing coffin, do we get to appreciate the only decent pair of pecs in the picture. Many of the extras, all of them white actors made up to look Polynesian, are a great argument for moving to colder climates. Some of them seem desperately in need of support garments.

And that pretty much takes care of any prurient interest in the male form. The film's pretty frustrating to the traditional male gaze, too. Later in the picture Kemo's widow, who lied because the new chief has promised to make her his woman, discovers he's been sleeping with Naomi (Tani Marsh, the only actual Polynesian with a major role). They engage in a catfight that's almost as flaccid as some of the extras' physiques. There's minimal contact, and at one point, Ridgeway runs into a tree for no seeming purpose other than to leave her knife lodged there.

Of course, that's just the tease to draw in older viewers. The real point of the film is to thrill the kiddie matinee crowd with the horrific tale of a murdered man coming back as Tabonga, an ambulatory tree, to kill his enemies. The film doesn't really succeed at that either. The tree is more funny than scary. It sort of shambles across the landscape; the bedridden could probably outrun it. Its arms don't appear to be much good, though they can carry potential victims (how it gets hold of them is another question; the body suit designed by Paul Blaisdell has workable elbows, but the shoulders aren't much good for anything). At one point it backs the evil chief up against a tree and seemingly rubs him to death. That's it — no strangling or beating — just a lot of vertical frottage. Maybe the tree gave him splinters that got infected, very quickly.

The film is pretty much mired in '50s attitudes, awash in a sea of colonialism and sexism. Since the tree and its victims are all natives, they're not the real focus of the film. Rather, the picture spends an inordinate amount of time on the U.S. scientific team, consisting of one aggressively male scientist (Tod Andrews), the female scientist he loves (Tina Carver) and an older scientist (John McNamara) who likes his liquor and, given his resistance to the women in the cast is probably a coded gay character. Even though Carver is a dedicated scientist, Andrews thinks the fact they're in love means they have to move back to the states where she can keep house and raise his children. Of course, as a scientist she's no great shakes. When a strange looking tree with a pulse starts growing from Kemo's grave, she and McNamara decide to study it by digging it up, putting it in their lab and pumping it full of an experimental serum she's been working on that should keep its heart pumping (convenient, no?). Then, with no knowledge of how the serum will affect an organism they've never seen before, she says they can all go to sleep and see how it's doing in the morning. When they awaken to find the lab wrecked and the tree thing missing, she and Andrews logically (?) conclude that means the tree came to life and ran off. She insists she can handle a gun when they go hunting or it, but then she straggles from the group to get sand out of her shoe, runs into the tree alone, screams twice (and none too well; it's more a squawk than a scream) and faints.

This is hardly the kind of sophisticated Polynesian civilization reported on by anthropologists. The natives are stereotyped Hollywood "others," no different from depictions of Native Americans or Africans in other films. Rather it's the goal of the U.S. scientists and military to bring civilization and science to them as a byproduct of their making sure the nearby nuclear testing hasn't done too much damage to the environment. This translates into hiring them as servants and using them as test subjects. 

  Linda Watkins prepares to act Tod Andrews off every screen in the lower 48.

Needless to say, the acting is not of the highest level. Carver has a pleasingly low voice, even if she doesn't know how to scream. Andrews can't seem to figure out what to do with his hands if he isn't smoking. And it's taking all my restraint not to make puns about the actors playing the natives being more wooden than Tabonga. The one exception is Linda Watkins, who plays Mrs. Kilgore, a British widow running the local trading post where her main product is comic relief. For some reason, the credits claim the film is introducing her, even though she had made half a dozen pictures in the '30s. Watkins started her career on stage as a member of the Theatre Guild's repertory company. Her performance seems scaled for a large theatre rather than the camera, but she throws herself into the flirtatious, loquacious character with a kind of carefree abandon that's infectious. In later years, she was a frequent TV guest star; as a cynical music critic in the Thriller episode "The Terror in Teakwood," she delivers the same kind of over-the-top performance, albeit in a more serious role. She's so much fun, you can't help wishing that instead of shooting at Tabonga they'd just had her talk it to death.