the favourite (2018)

[sea_changed]

I saw The Favourite last night (finally, good god); I'm finding that I'm having a hard time putting together a review of it. It was utterly wonderful, and I highly recommend it; it was genuinely funny and delightfully quirky and most of all very real. Those are the obvious things I want to say about it, and they're all extremely true, and yet, I don't feel any of my usual urge after watching a movie I love to immediately go back and watch it. There was something very difficult about it, and emotionally draining. Neither of these are negatives, or take away from my extreme love of it, but I don't think I realized the toll it was taking on me until after I got out of the theater. It turned out, after everything, that's an extraordinarily sad movie, and I'm not sure you fully realize that until the last ten minutes or so.

Some of the difficulty of watching it is easily explainable (heads up, people vomit a LOT in this movie; there's also a short and non-gory but still difficult to watch bit of animal cruelty); a lot of it is much less so. I think a lot of it hinges on its extraordinary effectiveness: all three of the women are such real people, and their relationships are deeply complex and portrayed with a delicacy and an attention that was riveting to watch. I couldn't decide who gave my favorite performance, as it changed almost scene by scene. Olivia Colman as Queen Anne captured all her difficult facets: she was pathetic and heartbreaking and ridiculous and tender and all of it cohered into a complex and finely-done portrait. Rachel Weisz as Sarah Churchill did what she did with such seamless perfection I'm not sure I can deconstruct it in a way that does it justice: she carried the whole movie on her shoulders so effortlessly that it didn't make you doubt for a moment that she could hold a country there as well. And Emma Stone as Abigail balanced the wide-eyed innocence and the serpent under it, as it were, extremely nicely: that moment of delight when you realized a machination of hers was always present, and made the ending hurt even more.

And, on a less difficult but no less complex note, the queerness of it was done wonderfully. The women's various personal, romantic, and sexual relationships were integral to the film without being ever the sole point; that is, they were integrated into the story without being the only story, in a way that you see constantly in films (etc.) involving heterosexual relationships but in my experience see more rarely in those involving gay ones. And, to add to that, I was continually delighted by the way the film treated heterosexual relationships, as well: they were almost unilaterally shown as consisting of bizarre and inexplicable rituals, from the odd dance scene between Sarah and Masham (who I definitely had to IMDb to get his name--men matter, individually, very little in this movie), to the equally bizarre fight-courtship between Abigail and Masham in the woods, the the hysterical wedding-night scene between the two of them. Heterosexuality is portrayed as unreal, removed and strange, in direct contrast to the painfully real humanity of the relationships between the women; it was excellently and fascinatingly done.

If you've seen it, I would love your thoughts; if you haven't, I highly recommend going out and watching it at once. I have a feeling I will be sitting with and processing it for a while yet.

Comments

[breathedout]

Aaaaaahhhh oh man I really need to see this. We've been meaning to get to it but have been super busy. But wow, what an amazing recommendation. I must make time in the very near future.

[sea_changed]

Yeah, it came out at just the wrong time for me wrt holiday busyness, but I'm so glad I finally found the time to watch it. I would love to hear your thoughts, once you've seen it: I loved it but I feel like there are a lot of finer emotions and thoughts I have about it that need and will continue to need working through.

[allheadybooks]

Highly agreed on all points, except that I'm dying to see it again! To me, it was a movie about power, and the naked exercise of power. If you want to show someone that you have power over them and compel them to obey you, you shove them right in the mud. I was wondering afterwards why I trusted this movie so much to handle sex work as a major theme, and I think it's because it strips away all the obscuring rationalizations from power and deals with it very plainly.

[sea_changed]

Definitely agreed: it's a movie that is at all times aware of power and the delicate (and sometimes extremely indelicate) balance of it. And I appreciated especially that the film did this while never sacrificing its characters' humanity; they never became caricatures or conduits for a certain idea, but they were so messily human in all their navigation and manipulation.

[22degreehalo]

Mmmm I really enjoyed this movie too, and I love your analysis! The thing about the m/f relationships being ritualistic but the f/f ones being bare and real was one I never thought of but makes so much sense!!

I don't have a whole lot to offer in terms of commentary but ugh I just really enjoyed how... messy and unattractive the wlw relations in it were? Even when queer women are portrayed as predatory or whatever there's still usually an overtone of Sexiness to it that isn't necessarily inherently bad (I myself enjoy sexy women on occasion) but there's really something so lost when queer women can't just be flawed and gross and strange but still authentic. Like, I know the line right now is 'we don't need tragic stories, we need femslash where everyone is good and perfect and supported and happy all the time' and while I like that occasionally it really ignores the loss that comes from erasing just... the reality that is that relationships are complicated!! In ways that aren't covered either by standard 'everyone dies, probably unloved' stories OR 'cutesey romcom but with 0 conflict' stories!

And something I really like about it is its portrayal of power dynamics. Normally, stories in which everyone is trying to grab power just exhaust me, because I don't see the appeal in power for its own sake, and too few actually bother to think about how people will be using this power. (House of Cards is a biiig offender here.) But The Favourite always knows what its characters want beyond that huge generalisation. Sarah wants political power, yes, and she enjoys being able to boss Queen Anne around, but she also seems to sincerely love her. (And I love that they did it this way - it makes it so much more interesting than if she was just totally cold-hearted and didn't care for her at all!) Abigail clearly wants power, but the reasons shift and change and don't become totally clear until the end - she wants to regain her status and noble pride, wants to protect herself against Sarah's machinations, but the end also makes clear she loves the lifestyle and gets a giddy, sometimes sadistic (holy hell though, even if nothing actually HAPPENED in that rabbit scene that was the most tense I've been in a movie in ages ;___;) joy out of being among the elite and powerful. And then the movie casts a pall on even this - in her struggle for power she's forced herself into two relationships she may not actually really enjoy, and now she has to live with the consequences of that. And in Queen Anne we see all of the best and worst of power - the privileges, yes, but also the heavy responsibility, and how easy it is to forget about that responsibility until it's too late, and to hurt people through your own cowardice, and how it makes you permanently unable to have normal relationships with other people. Not to mention of course that for all her power she was unable to fix the worst thing that has happened to her - the tragic death of so many children. And yet there's still a sense of pride, even if it's more about how she's perceived than about acting a queen in private, and just -

I dunno, I just love how complex it is and everyone is so selfish but they can also genuinely care about each other and don't always necessarily go after the things they really want most of all, and it's just... it's queer women who get to be selfish and mean and ugly but in ways unconnected to their queerness, where if anything that queerness can represent a hidden good side them?

But yeah, definitely very real and a very interesting (if often unpleasant to watch) movie!!

[sea_changed]

Yes! I loved that the relationships were real and messy and complicated, and I wholly agree with your point that they weren't "sexy" in the way f/f is almost always presented, despite the fact that there were some extremely attractive women running around that movie (will I ever be over Rachel Weisz in those costumes? Probably not). It presets, as you say, a perfect counterpoint to both the misery and death f/f storyline and the cookie-cutter everything must be perfect and fluffy storyline.

I think you've also hit on why I'm a little uneasy when people say this movie is about power, even though it absolutely, 100% is--because it creates characters with depth and reasons for why they want the things they want (or don't want the things they don't want, in Anne's case), and it's first and foremost about those people and their wants, which are of course intricately tied up in the balances of power at court. But the film always puts these three women first, and the film's storylines seen to grow out of them, rather then their characters being dictated by what the film is "about." (And I too am so glad that they presented Sarah's feelings for Anne as entirely real, if very complex--it added another layer to the movie that I love and appreciate.)

it's queer women who get to be selfish and mean and ugly but in ways unconnected to their queerness, where if anything that queerness can represent a hidden good side them? Oh yes, this is it entirely--they get to be people, whose queerness is integral to them (at least for Anne and Sarah) but not their defining trait. And the idea of queerness as somehow redemptive is one I love, and will definitely be thinking further about.

[allheadybooks]

Very smartly put! I also loved that they weren’t Sexy-with-a-capital-S, but complicated desiring people with real affection for one another.

[kyriacarlisle]

Now that I've finally seen it...

It's gorgeous, and messy, and I liked it lot...and I was sad pretty much all the way through. Perhaps because I fixed on Anne, and felt so sorry for her and so repulsed by her pretty, constricted life. (The people next to me were HUGELY, vocally betrayed the ending: I think they were expecting some kind of redemptive love-conquers-all scene.)

Heterosexuality is portrayed as unreal, removed and strange, in direct contrast to the painfully real humanity of the relationships between the women; it was excellently and fascinatingly done.

This was fantastic. So well done.

[sea_changed]

I felt deeply for Anne; I think the most striking moment of hers, for me, was the scenes with her and Abigail and the rabbits. After we're introduced to her as outsized, as irrational, as too much, she gets scaled back and you see the humanity of her so painfully and simply.

Yeah, the difference between the m/f and f/f relationships was so striking and so wonderfully done. (Interestingly, I think only Sarah and her husband escape from this trend--indeed, Marlborough is one of the least threatening male characters in the film in general, even on the rare occasions he's on screen.)

[kyriacarlisle]

The scenes that really struck me were Harley's ambush in Parliament - when she's so unprepared for debate and the one escape she has relies on perceptions of her irrational fraility, and then afterwards when she says that even though she's near-sighted she can tell when people are mocking her. I liked Sarah in those scenes, too; it's one of them times I had the clearest sense of her as a political actor.

[fosfomifira]

I finally watched this movie and I loved it. I thought it was an unusual in how it portrayed its characters. I usually don’t respond well to satire or anything there comes close, or to characters who are unpleasant for the sheer sake of unpleasantness. The Favourite could have easily overdone things and portray its characters as caricatures/satire, but it didn’t. They were deeply messy people, but very human because of it. How they felt, how they acted, the things they said: it all rang true and felt so very real. There was no sense of mockery regarding the characters, they were shown as they were, and with a certain degree of empathy because of their intrinsic humanity.

I do want to watch it again, partly because of Rachel Weisz's costumes, partly because of the production design, partly to appreciate the acting properly. Rachel Weisz's role was the least flashy, but she turned out to be the most attuned to herself and her wants out of the main characters. For all that she was a politician, she loved Anne and seemed to genuinely care for her husband, too, whereas Anne and Abigail tended to delude themselves about themselves a bit more.

I adored how inconsequential the men were to the story. Sure, they were unavoidable in the bigger context/the broader world, but they very emotional presence in the movie. It was as if Anne, Sarah and Abigail had carved a world of their own and men simply didn’t belong there.

(I did get a bit of a headache while watching it, possibly because it was so intense)

[sea_changed]

I thought it was fascinating how stylized it was and how. . .grotesque it was, in a lot of ways, and how it did edge over into satire sometimes, but it was never satirizing them, the women it put at the center of bizarre world. I feel like I just keep repeating myself when I talk about this movie, but they were soreal, so incredibly human, just as you say. It made them and the movie so incredibly compelling, in the midst of all its grotequeries.

Sarah definitely became the center of the movie, despite some extremely fierce competition. I agree entirely that she was the only one out of the three of them to really understand herself: she played games and she put on acts put I think beneath it all she knew who she was. Whereas Abigail was all an act, with no solid ground behind it for her to stand on, and Anne tried so hard to be herself and yet never managed to match what she wanted to any true understanding of who she was.

Exactly--the men were there but tangential, especially emotionally: the movie couldn't even muster enough feeling about them to hate them. They were foolish or ridiculous or bland, but never really evil: they were mostly just set dressing. In fact, they were treated the way that women are often treated in movies about men (i.e., most of them), which was completely brilliant.