The Favourite, or, Sneaking in Tongues

I was predisposed to like The Favourite, since I’m a big fan of all three of its leads, I was immediately won over by its trailers, and of course I’ve been hearing praise for it in the years since. It seemed like there was a brilliant movie that I was guaranteed to love, just waiting for me to make the time to actually watch it.

But that enthusiasm cooled a little bit after seeing the filmmakers’ other projects that followed. Poor Things is also directed by Yorgos Lanthimos from a screenplay adapted by Tony McNamara, and I’d been even more excited to see it. It’s an objectively stunning movie, with astounding art direction, deliberately bonkers performances, iconic but disorienting music, and a tone that mashes together black comedy, slapstick, and an earnest exploration of what it means to be human in a cruel and often brutal world. But as much as I appreciated it, its often weird cinematic flourishes, and its wild shifts in tone, felt too arch and distancing for me to connect to anything. I didn’t feel much of anything beyond revulsion.

And after The Favourite, McNamara created The Great, which is essentially the same mission statement expanded to a full series: all the trappings of a gorgeous, stuffy, historical drama with an at-least-loose basis in fact, presented as dark and bawdy satirical comedy. I’ve only seen the first couple of episodes of that series, and again, it does everything right. But again, it felt as if the spark of it ran out quickly. By the end of the second episode, I already felt like I got everything that it was about.

So I went into The Favourite with a little bit of trepidation. On the surface, it’s the same idea: all the impeccable art direction, costume design, and cinematography of the stuffiest historical drama, in service of a dark comedy with no fear of being too profane, vulgar, or anachronistic.

It comes right out of the gate setting its tone of “we’re taking the piss out of historical dramas,” even before the movie’s gotten started. Over the studio bumpers, we don’t hear anything but very faint sounds of the countryside, with chickens clucking the 20th Century Fox fanfare.

Then a scene with Queen Anne and her closest friend and advisor, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. It is straight out of a movie about the lives of the royals, with servants slowly folding up the Queen’s robe and carefully removing her crown as she stands, dispassionate and regal, thinking on matters of the court. But as soon as the servants leave, we immediately see the nature of their relationship, a casual familiarity that only comes from a lifelong friendship and mutual love.

And then we’re introduced to Abigail, Sarah’s cousin. She’s initially presented as the stereotypical sheltered, beautiful young woman who’s about to have her naivety and innocence shattered when she’s thrown into the machinations of the royal court. That familiar introduction to a familiar character type is almost immediately undercut when she sees that the soldier across from her in a crowded carriage is masturbating while staring at her, and he grabs her ass while she’s leaving the carriage, causing her to fall face-first into the mud.

I was immediately swept up in all of it. Not just the plot, but the way that the filmmaking and the plot were perfectly in service of each other. All of the weird and disorienting flourishes which could usually make a film seem arch and distancing — abrupt cuts in time or space, bizarre lines of dialogue left to hang there with no explanation, sudden emotional outbursts, camera angles that feel too close or too wide — instead felt intriguing.

There’s a sense that The Favourite is showing you things that might all seem overly familiar if you’ve seen any historical drama at all, but it’s demanding that you look at them in a different way. The Queen is impetuous and tempestuous, swinging wildly between needy insecurity and outraged imperiousness. Her closest friend and advisor is shrewd and manipulative, placating the Queen while pulling all of the strings as her de facto regent. The newcomer is an outsider, perpetually in danger of having her kindness and humanity shattered in an environment that treats lower classes not just with disrespect, but with disregard or outright contempt. The Favourite demands that we see them as real things happening to real, weird, unpredictable, often awful, people, instead of just familiar characters playing out familiar story beats.

One of the most distinctive ways the movie does this, especially early on, is by inter-cutting or dissolving between two disparate images, demanding that you figure out what the connection or significance is. An example from later in the movie is a scene of a nude man happily standing in front of a folding screen in one of the elaborate halls of the palace, as a bunch of noblemen raucously throw fruit at him. It’s not given any explanation, and it’s filmed in partial slow motion, a jarring jolt of surreality. The movie cuts between this and shots of Abigail going about her business. Initially there doesn’t seem to be any connection, but the combination seeds the idea that she’s on her way to becoming as ludicrously corrupt as these supposed nobles.

Even more effective is when The Favourite holds uncomfortably long on a character’s face, often in close-up, and often when it feels like something even more interesting is happening off screen. There’s a scene with a ball, and Sarah chooses a man to dance with while Anne watches from her wheelchair. (I have no idea if the dance is at all historically accurate, but I desperately hope it isn’t, since it is hilariously bizarre). Instead of lingering on the dance and occasionally cutting back to Anne’s reaction, the camera stops paying attention to the dance at all, and it just focuses on her face. It’s not a broad or violent outburst; in fact, her expression is basically unreadable. But the longer the camera lingers on her face, the more you get a sense of the rage that’s boiling underneath. Not the sudden outbursts that everyone in the court has come to expect, but something much deeper, driven as much by fear as by anger.

Of course, you can only do that kind of thing when you’re working with actors like Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone. The Favourite only works because it has actors who are adept at both drama and comedy, and are fearless in how much of themselves they’ll dedicate to the part. It’s rare to get one actor who can do that, practically unheard of to find three. (For that matter, all of the performances in the movie are outstanding, and I didn’t detect a single false note from anyone. It’s so enjoyable to watch a movie where it seems like everyone at every level just gets it).

The Favourite is full of scenes of surreal dark comedy: moments that are too broad or weird to make sense. Nobles holding a duck race inside the Queen’s court. Sarah getting splattered in the face by blood after Abigail shoots a bird. Harley casually pushes Abigail down a hill after he’s tired of a conversation. Practically every scene of Abigail and Marsham’s “courtship.”

The characters are witty, but there’s actually not a lot of the nasty, verbal sparring of something like The Thick of It, where the humor comes from how cruel clever people in power can be. It’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and it’s rarely shocking or vulgar enough to register as so-outrageous-they’re funny. The moments where the sparring escalates to unforgivable behavior don’t have the feel of “oh boy, the game is on now!” but instead are shown almost matter-of-factly, as if there’s a sense of inevitability to them.

It seems like it all shouldn’t work, neither grounded enough to be a straightforward character-based drama, nor quite outrageous enough to be truly daring black comedy. What makes it work is that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in being straightforward or outrageous.

We’re never allowed to forget that our main characters have more going on than is evident on the surface. And it’s not in the sense you’d expect from a story about keeping up appearances in a royal court filled with back-stabbing and jealously; it’s all happening simultaneously.

The Queen genuinely is insecure and impetuous, but she’s not stupid or completely incompetent. She’s aware that she’s being manipulated, and she’s happily using it to her advantage. She keeps constant reminders of the tragedy in her life, visible signifiers of her loneliness. Sarah is shrewd, stubborn, steadfastly convinced she’s always in the right, and brazenly manipulative, but she keeps none of it hidden, because it is genuinely motivated by love: for Anne, for her husband, and for England.

And Abigail is genuinely sincere and initially motivated by kindness, trying to keep her integrity and humanity intact while also desperate to secure a place among the nobles that’ll guarantee she doesn’t have to go back to the horrors of her past. Even while she’s directly monologuing about her true intentions, it’s evident that she’s trying to convince herself of something, not the audience. She’s trying to navigate an environment of uneasy alliances, betrayals, and outright back-stabbing, determined to come out ahead without losing the core of herself in the process.

By the end of The Favourite, you can recognize it as a tragedy. Three characters who are all far from blameless, but whose character flaws or mistakes get punished far beyond what feels like poetic justice. And the “art film” flourishes don’t create a distance between you and the characters as you watch the plot play out, but drive home the tragedy of it. The intercuts between Sarah struggling to write a letter and Anne distractedly asking for the mail. The camera lingering on Abigail as she fully realizes the depth of the relationship she helped to destroy. And the final scene, which seems mundane enough to be ambiguous, if not for the expressionless face of a woman who’s been completely drained of joy and life, a woman understanding the purgatory she’s built for herself, and images of rabbits layered on top of each other in cross-dissolve, ending with a sense of tragedy layered on tragedy layered on tragedy.