The Favourite makes Olivia Colman an awards front runner

Queen Anne was the last of the Stuart monarchs and, history tells us, an unremarkable ruler. Not much happened during the reign of Anne and her consort Prince George of Denmark. There was apparently an incident in January 1711 when, evidently out of the blue, she appointed Abigail Hill, a former chambermaid, to be the Keeper of the Privy Purse. This was a very public snub to her previous confidante Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough.

If you think, ho hum, you’d be wrong. It may all have been a bit tedious in real life but in fiction this is the jumping off point for The Favourite, the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos, in which this palace spat is the foundation for a bawdy romp which at times crackles with invention and mischief.

In doing so it features three staggeringly good performances from Olivia Colman as Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as the rivals for her affection, both literal and political. Much of the attention rightly goes to Colman for a career best performance which is bringing her long overdue international attention, but we should not overlook Weisz as Sarah Churchill. Her performance is heart breaking and, even allowing for Lanthimos’s usual difficulties with ending a story, I came away feeling perhaps sorrier for her than anyone else in the film.

The Favourite wears its cinematic antecedents lightly. There are obvious visual references to Barry Lyndon (1975) and Marie Antoinette (2006) but perhaps it owes most to All About Eve. This behind the scenes palace soap owes a lot to the 1950 movie with Emma Stone as Eve to Rachel Weisz’s Margo Channing.

The scheming and duplicity are rife as the rivals jockey for influence and manipulate the leading politicians of the day. In that sense The Favourite is a welcome female turnabout on what was very definitely a male society. Women are so insulated here that Colman’s monarch knows next to nothing about the war being fought in her name.

At the heart of it all is The Queen, played here as a woman with some challenging mental health issues. The implication is that the failure of seventeen pregnancies has taken its toll both physically and emotionally, which is hardly surprising. But Anne is no soft touch. She is aware of the competition for her favour and she is not above playing one against the other, if for no reason than to brighten up a dull life.

In some ways this film is about the emptiness of power. She is the most powerful woman in the realm, but her power is circumscribed; in real life Anne was diligent about her Parliamentary responsibilities apparently. What she wants is a friend and, possibly, a lover and to be treated as a person not a head of state.

All of this is addressed in a terrific screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Unusually for a Lanthimos film, characters are given great dialogue and make the most of it.  Looking at Lanthimos’s previous English language films, The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), you could be forgiven for thinking that the characters had only learned to speak English on the day of filming. Here the lines are whip-smart, the one-liners sting, and there is real point and purpose to most of the dialogue. Not surprisingly the cast fill their collective boots.

Visually, The Favourite is stunning. Having watched Mary, Queen of Scots (2018) and All is True (2018) at about the same time as this one it seems that filming by candlelight is this year’s thing for cinematographers. Robbie Ryan’s fluid camerawork here keeps the film moving as quickly as the dialogue and it provides a unique look for a period piece. The only thing that irritated me is his use of ultra-wide fisheye shots for his masters; I understand why he did it I just found it irritating. It took me out of the picture too often.

For me The Favourite is a little over-praised. It is less than the sum of its parts but some of those parts – not least the performances and the script – are spectacular and well worth the price of a ticket.