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Yorgos Lanthimos is one hell of an idiosyncratic auteur. Not just in his use of fishbowl lenses, or the darkly humorous conceits, or the generally corrosive aura that permeates every scene, but in his overall choices of unconventional, occasionally incoherent material. The Favourite keeps up his streak of oddball cinema by turning his weird eye towards the usually staid costume drama.
The Favourite has far more in common with the mildly anachronistic entries like Amadeus or Marie Antoinette then it does something like Victoria & Abdul or The Danish Girl. Think of this as a distaff Barry Lyndon after having ingested a copious amount of illicit substances. It is delightfully batshit.
The primary focuses is on highlighting the pettiness involved in obtaining and maintaining power in the court, and a subplot involving war with France and political party power plays is rendered as mere window dressing to parrying between the queen’s rival sycophants. Was that too long a sentence that made the plotline sound somewhat like word salad? Let me pull it back and explain in more detail.
The Favourite provides not one but three of the best female performances of the year. Scratch that, it’s three of the best performances of the year in the wider field. Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman) is entirely dependent upon Sarah (Rachel Weisz), her confidant, longtime friend and lover, who is often treated as the real power broker behind the crown. Into their clandestine affair crashes Abigail (Emma Stone), Sarah’s cousin and a woman who hides towering ambition behind a mask of sweet servitude. Having grown up in a hard knock life and sensing a chance for financial comfort and persona stability, Abigail displaces Sarah as the queen’s favorite (hey, get the title) but Sarah’s not going down without a fight.
Much of the film is concerned with watching Abigail and Sarah circling each other for weaknesses and they emerge as feral cats looking for dominance. Queen Anne operates as woman entombed in entitlement and pampered infantilism, look at how she’s easily distracted by the latest shiny object or the person who most readily strokes her ego to make a final decision. Think of how Abigail outpaces Anne and secures herself a marriage above her station, a secure financial position, and poisons the well against Sarah all in one sweeping gesture. Sarah is far more direct and withholds the dripping honey of Abigail. Sarah functions less as a shiny new object and far more as a long-term partner in a relationship that’s obtaining rust in the joints.
There’s a lot of material for this incredibly talented trio of actresses to play. Weisz possesses a polite sternness and stiff-lipped formality that registers as both incredibly intelligent/competent and unnerving/frightening. Don’t let that lovely face fool you, there’s a dragoness lurking beneath the surface and she knows she doesn’t need to grandly demonstrate her powers loudly. While Stone puts her canned performance in La La Land to shame here, and nearly steals the entire show. Her faux subordinate charms are slowly peeled away in scenes where she (literally) beats an officer for expressing romantic/sexual interest in her or she threatens one of the queen’s rabbits.
Yet it’s Coleman who gives the most aggressively daring and complicated performance of the three. Weisz and Stone have clearly delineated characters and trajectories to play while Coleman is a grotesquerie that reveals real human feeling and pain in unexpected moments. As Queen Anne’s body succumbs to gout, poor eyesight, and a childish temperament, Coleman plays it all at a draggy pitch, think Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Then she’ll turn around and reveal that she owns these seventeen rabbits as a method of dealing with the various stillbirths and lost pregnancies she’d endured over her lifetime. It’s a performance that hits a few notes then surprises you with a completely new set of them at unexpected moments.
The Favourite is most enjoyable when it narrows its focus to central triangle, and a whole series of subplots involving taxation, the war with France, and Nicholas Hoult’s sublime supporting work as an inept Machiavellian prime minister all get tossed around and don’t build to anything satisfactory. Although, a ball scene that descends into the vision of Hoult nearly voguing in full-on period garb is one opening fan (thworp!) away from Madonna’s infamous MTV performance, and it’s completely strange and wonderful. These strands don’t sustain their heft throughout the third act and the end of the film feels like a series of mildly unsatisfactory climaxes until we get to the real ending, which manages to stick the landing with a haunting grace note.
