This gets at the heart of The Favourite, which is one of the most evident trends in anti-sexist filmmaking lately: to be willing to portray women as unadulteratedly evil, as hateful and brutal as the men that have always made us think masculinity is a terrible idea. There are no paramours in The Favourite; Abigail isn’t a damsel through distress, or made evil by an oppressive society. Yes, she has been oppressed, and now she is a greater evil than the society; the empathy goes out of her rebellion, and this is what leads us to pity. Putting her in context is only possible using Sarah. She becomes the most important figure in the film.
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Having pity for characters in movies usually requires a kind of reluctance that verges on grief. We have to be shown what makes a person deserve our attention, and then subject ourselves to the negative, the post-trauma person, so that the actions they take in response to being wronged can be seen as heroic. And heroism born of pity always leaves a kind of longing for either and that’s the grief: they do not logically destroy each other, but instinctually we know that they can’t both exist at once. We can’t feel sorry for a hero. It prevents us from wanting to be them.
The Favourite, a black comedy by the mercurial Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, is the most stunning, layered portrait of pity in recent cinema. Its sympathies evolve and entwine like cream and sugar on the surface of coffee; they are separate figures, then combined, then entwined, then fading separately. We understand the three people that provide the pillars of this story on their own terms, and then in the terms of the time, and finally in terms of each other. They are moving portraits that change our allegiances, and open their age to us. They are incarnate sympathies, anthems to struggle, and each alone is as powerful as any performance of the decade. Together they’re chemical.
The movie begins with a power vacuum no one is aware of. Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) rules England; Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), rules Queen Anne. Between them is a space made larger by love and power, by Sarah’s insistent mothering (she’s really mothering her country) and Anne’s inability to think more highly of herself than Sarah thinks. Sarah is always reminding Anne of what Anne thinks of things, in case she forgets. We see a queen known to history mostly for being fat and ill and get no counterargument, at first – squealing to get her way, pleading to be pushed faster in her wheelchair down candlelit chambers, passing out when she has to make a hard decision.
Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) hopes to fill the vacuum with the one thing that Sarah is unable to do, which is to lie. “Some days you look like a badger. And you can rely on me to tell you,” Sarah pleads, “Because I will not lie! That is love!” Abigail tells Anne that she always looks like an angel; the battle for their affection really becomes the battle for what kind of ego Anne is willing to have. Lanthimos doesn’t use this lesbian love triangle as a political masthead; it’s not pretty, it’s not revolutionary, it’s not noble. Sarah has sex with Anne to please her country; Abigail does it to acquire power from Sarah through Anne; Anne does it because she’s tired of being in pain. You wouldn’t expect it of Abigail at first: she arrives at the castle peppy, like she’s answering an ad to become the castle schoolteacher, and covered in mud. She has a big grin and a cold, red nose. At first, we see Sarah manipulate Anne through sex and verbal abuse and we feel that we’re seeing a villain attacking a victim. But screenwriter Deborah Davis thinks way more about this story (her first draft for The Favourite was completed in 1998, after all) – she creates mythology out of it.
What becomes clear is that none of Abigail’s schoolgirl niceties come from a nice place: they are calculated to burden those she gives them to. There’s no compliment that’s more than a bribe in disguise; no offer that won’t result in a chess move in her favor. She pretends to sleep in Anne’s bed, just so she can wake up embarrassed and naked, to tempt Anne with her body. She has an interest in sex but only as a power move. In a scene in which she playfully rolls in leaves, dodging and advancing the clutches of the eager Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn), we can see that there’s no sweetness in it. She de-sweetens an entire story genre, possibly an entire movie gender.
This gets at the heart of The Favourite, which is one of the most evident trends in anti-sexist filmmaking lately: to be willing to portray women as unadulteratedly evil, as hateful and brutal as the men that have always made us think masculinity is a terrible idea. There are no paramours in The Favourite; Abigail isn’t a damsel through distress, or made evil by an oppressive society. Yes, she has been oppressed, and now she is a greater evil than the society; the empathy goes out of her rebellion, and this is what leads us to pity. Putting her in context is only possible using Sarah. She becomes the most important figure in the film.
Without her, Abigail might simply be a portrait of what women have to become to fight their way up in a male-dominated world; in other words, she might seem noble. Abigail’s Shakespearean acidity may just be the natural state for a woman of strong will and good upbringing; we can see that education makes nicety dangerous. But with the presence of Sarah, there’s more to that story. We see that Sarah is brutal, that she stares down beasts, that she fights for every inch she gets. We see her slaughter ducks in butch hunting clothes and dominate Anne in bed like a possessive husband. But we also see her towering virtue, her patriotism and her honesty, and we see the possibility of keeping esteem intact in even the most oppressive conditions (one of Abigail’s lies hits an impenetrable wall: she accuses Sarah of stealing from the treasury, and Anne knows that this can’t be true; virtue is the one thing Abigail couldn’t foresee). We see the non-essentiality of Abigail, and that not only gives The Favourite a sense of hope, but it allows its turmoil to remain wry. “Even if I were the last person alive in this place,” Abigail says, “I would still be a lady.” What a lady is, exactly, is one of the finer points of The Favourite. By the end, we can see the real meaning of her statement, which is less like a statement of virtue and more like being a lady will ensure that she’s the last one alive, if it comes to it. It extracts the romanticism from the time, but doesn’t turn it into drudgery. Hope makes it funny.
The look of the film puts these people inside a moving painting; The Favourite feels less like the time, whatever it was, and exactly as it has been preserved in rococo ornamentation and baroque paintings. They are ornate to the point of foolishness, swirls of gold, fields of angels, eternities of flowers. Production designer Fiona Crombie creates a nesting doll of places that seem expansive and also lonely, huge spans of floor and high ceilings that contain so much that they seem more enclosing the bigger they get. That’s the feel of the era, and in Anne’s heart, the queen who lived with hundreds and ruled millions and could not keep herself from being lonely (she lost all 17 children, in one way or another). Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan use a lot of wide lenses and fisheye shots; it allows us to see all the corners of the ceiling, to paradoxically enclose people in an open space. Even zooming in occurs with a scope of distance; traveling through the queen’s bed curtains, for instance, and yet still being able to see the ceiling. Ryan described the setting of the movie as “a playground that turns into a battleground that turns into a prison.” He understands the space of the age perfectly.
The performances stun. Stone weaponizes that look she has, of someone willing to be willing, which is a look that all men crave but would regret to do so here. Someone remarks that “a man’s dignity is the only thing that keeps him from running amok,” and Stone gives Abigail the look of someone who likes things amok; she’s so morally bankrupt that the nicer she gets, the more she’s looking down on you. Weisz exerts power, and manly deference, and a strong chin. She’s never quite fit into those roles as action hero love interests (in The Mummy, something was off, like her eyebrows were too bushy or her legs were too strong; there was some strength in her that kept her from living down to that kind of part). With Lanthimos (she was terrific in The Lobster as well), she’s found her calling as the straight man of black comedies.
As for Colman, it’s impossible to measure her. She has the babyish longing that should make sympathy impossible but instead merely replaces it with pity because of her capacity to seem like she means better; she has the defiance of a jilted schoolgirl and the tortured longing of a mother to nothing but gravestones. A scene where she dances with Abigail could be the movie’s best, and yet it’s just as twistedly enchanting as when she’s demented, waiting for a letter from a lost lover. She’s a sad blob, a tower of sadness, sadness which keeps going until it becomes love. There’s so much capacity for truth in her that she defies an annoying nature; through sheer grief, Colman finds in her the ability to become noble.
Lanthimos devised strange rehearsal rituals for these ladies; the results are so potent that they should be taught in schools. He tried to detach them from their lines, and isolate the connection they have with each other, as bodies, as beings. He made them read this movie in Twister positions, while jumping around or screaming on the floor. He wanted them to “sense each other,” he said, “without seeing each other.” The result is a comedy not of errors but of interests, with a whole cast that can read lines of great humor completely straight because they aren’t even thinking about what they mean anymore: they’re focused on each other, on breath, on eyes. They are living the moments of desire that the lines bring into focus, and they’ve forgotten all their lines. The result is magnificent. Nicolas Hoult plays the foppish Robert Harley, one of the queen’s opponents in parliament, with enough gusto to helm his own movie.
Like the great paintings of the era, The Favourite isn’t merely exuberant, it’s deceptively still. There’s an illusion of drama in it, as though it’s very far away, and the lens catching all those corners and all that artifice adds to the dilemma of surprising us, and moving us, at such a distance. Lanthimos knows that there’s something funny in that, something that he hoped would become his dollhouse of scrolling curves and pastel walls. He keeps us far enough away to laugh at people so strange and terrible, at the way they seek power and wrong each other and fail to ever bring themselves back into focus after great trauma. Any closer and we’d have to hate, or love them. The joy of watching The Favourite is a luxury of distance. It’s what helps us to finally find our pity.
