The Favourite

The Favourite was pretty great. I wanted it to head eventually in a more surprising direction, but this is a beautifully realized film. I laughed a great deal and enjoyed myself immensely.

Sandy Powell is a genius and honestly deserves a 4th Oscar.

Olivia Colman is excellent in The Favourite, and I really loved Rachel Weisz, too. The supporting cast is also excellent. Nicholas Hoult and Joe Alwyn are both especially funny. (There is this amazing scene where Nicholas Hoult just pushes Emma Stone into a ditch that had me cackling.) I have to say that I never really like Emma Stone, though. Something about her always feels like she's playing dress-up – like she never quite gets over hoping that we'll believe her.

The Favourite is not perfect (even if its costumes are). It loses steam by act three, and my theory for why this happens is that the film actually stops surprising us. In most of Lanthimos's films, one never feels as though one has understood all of the rules. He changes them up again and again, until we are bewildered and puzzled beyond what is bearable. He did this with Dogtooth and The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (though I think that one was slightly more accessible – and slightly less interesting because of this). But with The Favourite, we actually learn the rules of the game. They become clear at about the point in the movie, I think, when Emma Stone watches from the bookcase while Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz fuck. The world, I think, begins to make sense in that moment, and like Emma Stone's character, we, too, understand what needs to be done, how she can win.

And so the delightfully confounding insanity of the film's first act and most of its second is replaced by a kind of toleration of the queen's peccadilloes. Her desires and whims become things which we both understand and which begin to grow tiresome.

The film's ending still works very well, and the acting stays excellent, but the screenplay loses its energy, even if there are still a few delightful scenes in the last half of the movie (I'm thinking especially of the sequence where the men hurl citrus fruits at that naked courtier).

And... this movie is about Trump, right? The ending certainly put me in mind of our president. (The oranges being hurled at the naked man, while not an obvious Trump reference, certainly could be read as one. He is orange, after all.) But I think, too, that perhaps my impatience with the film's latter half is a kind of Trumpian boredom, too. What I mean is this: a surprising person with a lot of power is interesting. What is he going to do? Whom will he bomb? Will we all die? What idiocy is going to come out of his mouth next? But once one realizes that there are no surprises left, that he hasn't anything really interesting to say, that he (like Queen Anne) just wants to be loved and adored and he doesn't care who gives him that fix, the whole thing becomes a bit of a chore. It's no longer an adventure at all.

Again, I really liked this movie – I'm just trying to make sense of why that last third of the picture didn't totally knock it out of the park.