I’m belated in my discussion of The Favourite but having just finally watched it and having a strong reaction to it, I felt compelled to at least give a “short take” on it.
Okay, before I convey my issues with this film, let me stress that I DID like it! As so many others have articulated, the film is sumptuously mounted, giving us complex mise en scenes (everything within the frame) and a truly extraordinary production design. The innovative use of the wide angle fish-eye lens – to create a striking and I think meaningful use of form (creating a distorted effect, reflecting a distorted world/humanity) that isn’t exploited enough – was tremendous and oh so welcome.
As has been noted by many, the acting is really first rate as well, Olivia Colman especially deserving of the “Best Actress” Academy Award win she received, her rendition as the sad and complex Anne, Queen of Britain staying with me long after I watched the film. I also found the film amusing and thoroughly engaging, and director Yorgos Lanthimos (of The Lobster fame) gives us his trademark quirkiness and offbeat moments (that dance!) and eclectic dialogue.
Having said that, I have one major issue with The Favourite that for me prevents it from being a truly deep and brilliant film:
In short, to my mind, the film has no moral center. We are initially sutured into the perspective and experiential narrative thread of Abigail (Emma Stone), a figure that I think we can roughly say is an “innocent” (relatively speaking since it sounds from the snippets we get of her past that she has already been exposed to and forced to grapple with an immoral world) who is our moral center as we move deeper into this cesspool of immoral characters. As Abigail realizes she is in a nest of vipers, she quickly chucks her moral imperative and adopts her benefactor Lady Sarah’s viperous philosophy (punctuated by the predatory shooting sequences) and engages Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) in a battle of wits and actual acts of violence (Abigail ends up spiking Lady Sarah’s drink). For me, the key scene is when Abigail verbally works through her plight, when she says that her choices are two, either she holds on to her moral character and end up a prostitute used by “syphilis” infected men or she chucks her moral imperative and avoid such a degraded state of being. To avoid such a state, though, means that she will have to fight fire with fire, becoming the immoral characters that seem to wholly inhabit this time period, according to this film anyway. At the point where Abigail chooses to lose her moral grounding and become in effect Lady Sarah, the film loses its moral center as well.
Now, I actually have no problem with a director choosing this course – one of my all time favorite filmmakers is Stanley Kubrick (for my deeper thoughts on Kubrick,see my disquisition on his films) and at least some of his films (A Clockwork Orange!) had little in the way of a moral center – but for me it has to be attached to some deeper meaning, or, more precisely, attached to a deeper root cause. To my mind, The Favourite doesn’t do that. The film seems to want to suggest that humanity is innately bad and the innocents of this world will eventually get swallowed up by this badness and become bad themselves. It may be that Lanthimos meant to just target the aristocratic world but (A) even the snap images of the working class world seem viperous and/or (B) Lanthimos chooses not to give us an alternative to this viperous world, suggesting perhaps that, again, he sees most if not all of humanity as degraded. Now, had he specifically focused on a root cause toxic ideology or ideologies – say patriarchy or capitalism (and, yes, capitalism didn’t technically exist in this time period but the seeds of capitalism were already planted then, and in any case, period pieces are not really about the period represented but more so about our present moment) — or even if he had just wanted to suggest that excessive wealth, power, and image corrupt absolutely then this lack of a moral center might have worked better. In terms of the latter possibility (an alternative to this viperous world), Lanthimos would have had to give us – give Abigail – a real alternative to choosing immorality, e.g., perhaps make her husband a good man who gives her an out or perhaps just suggest that she could live a working class life free from the corruption and viperousness of the aristocratic world. But because he doesn’t give Abigail a way out, Lanthimos seems to imply that Abigail’s only choice is to be a viper and thus, again, that humanity is bad and makes other otherwise good people bad.
What kind of makes me angry is how the film even seems to muddy up the one possible good course that the film could have taken. That is, there seems to be a suggestion of a possibility of Abigail taking up a righteous cause in fighting for the people, e.g., not getting them taxed to death and fighting for peace instead of endless wars (early on Lanthimos gives us a cut to an Abigail who seems to be listening — distress visually registered on her face — to Lady Bird’s deeply immoral manipulation of the Queen, to get her to do these very immoral deeds); however, instead of going in this direction, Abigail just becomes another variation of Lady Sarah and continues to manipulate the sorrowful and dysfunctional (neurotic) Queen (Olivia Colman) for her own self-centered ends instead of for a righteous cause, e.g., the good of the people.
(I still haven’t researched the actual history of this moment, so of course there are limitations within actual historical facts to what choices Lanthimos has here but I can’t believe that some sort of moral center wasn’t possible or, again, at least a deeper take on historical root causes that caused such immorality.)
In short, instead of giving us some deeper (progressive) lessons, the film instead chooses nihilism, suggesting that humanity is a nihilistic species, a pretty despairing choice and one that I find problematic. But, then, this seems to be Lanthimos’s view, since the other two films of his that I have seen (The Lobster, Dogtooth) also seem to take this dreary, and, more to the point, shallow tract, which, for me anyway, is unfortunate, since in all other ways, Lanthimos seems like a truly gifted director.