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

[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.