ELIZABETH: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Polygram, 1998) Universal Home Video

History vs. art – and never has the twain yet met to thoroughly satisfy academic scholarship, though especially in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), an engrossing fiction of interwoven political intrigues, charting the supposed turbulent rise of one of England’s most enigmatic monarchs – Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett). Almost from the moment it hit theater screens, Elizabeth was mercilessly savaged by historians, chastising its artistic liberties and its fast and loose distortion of the narrative timeline in actual events. Indeed, Michael Hirst’s screenplay is a bit of a higglety-pigglety hodge-podge – Hirst, cherry-picking his points of interest, and reinventing the Queen’s early years to suit his own artistic temperament.  Worse – at least for some – Blanchett’s sovereign appears to suffer from a deplorable lack of trajectory, this Elizabeth’s indecisiveness and moral ambiguity, starkly contradicted by history’s account of the potent, resolute and shrewd monarch, who maneuvered her way through the political quagmire of perilous palace intrigues. There is something to this, of course, as Blanchett’s ‘Liz’ remains rather dependent on her principled secretary, Francis Walsingham (magnificently realized by Geoffrey Rush), and generally conflicted in her passion for Joseph Fiennes’ Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester who, so this movie foretells, aspired to be the man behind the throne. This too is false, as Dudley had no part in the conspiracy against Elizabeth, though vanity likely encouraged his interests to toddle along.

Right from the outset, Kapur muddies truth – opening with the public incineration of three unknown heretics and Queen Mary’s (Kathy Burke) false pregnancy, so suggested as the first signs of a malignant tumor eating away at her sanity, to result in her eventual death. In fact, Mary suffered from no such growth and died four years after Elizabeth had already been imprisoned in the Tower of London.  It is one thing to mark actual events from history in a condensed format to benefit the obvious limitations of a motion picture (biographical movies are incapable of telling the whole story – ever), but Kapur’s mangle does not even get the basics right. Liz was under house arrest at Woodstock – not Hatfield. And her summons to Hampton Court was for Mary’s supposed delivery – which, of course did not happen, though Liz would remain in the Queen’s service until Mary’s husband, Philip II of Spain went abroad. In life, Robert Dudley was neither exiled from Elizabeth’s court, nor her heart, remaining a close confident – and quite possibly more – until his death in 1588, long after the ‘official’ account of their romance had cooled. Again, for concision, we can almost forgive Kapur’s fudging of another fact. Elizabeth knew Dudley was married to Amy Robsart, the latter living obscurely in the country and slowly dying of breast cancer in 1560 – two years into the Queen’s reign. However, what are we to make of Kapur’s outright lie about the fate of Mary of Guise (Fanny Ardant), another plotter, but one who was not assassinated by Walsingham as depicted in this movie. Rather, she succumbed to edema. And then, there is the decision to hire 75-yr.-old Richard Attenborough to play William Cecil, not yet the 1st Baron of Burghley (as he is presented herein) – and not such a terrible casting choice either, until one realizes the real Cecil was 38-yrs. Attenborough’s junior and barely 13-yrs. older than the real Queen! In Elizabeth, we are meant to infer the Queen felt it necessary for Cecil to retire – presumably infirmed with age, when, in fact, he remained her Chief Advisor and Lord High Treasurer from 1572 until his death in 1598.

And, although it was first conceived Elizabeth should enter into a marriage of state with Henry, Duke of Anjou (rechristened in this movie as Francis, and played for a transvestite by Vincent Cassel – never mind, the real Henry showed no such proclivity, and, was, in fact, Henry II’s heir, not Queen Mary’s nephew) the real Elizabeth, 37 at the time, never actually met this boy (Henry was barely 19), fruitlessly peddled to become her husband some 12-yrs. into her reign, not at the outset, and, as a means to control her from the inside, as depicted in this movie. It was, in fact, Henry’s sibling, Francis, who aggressively pursued Elizabeth when she was already 45 and he, just turned 23. Finally, the end of Elizabeth depicts the re-virgin-ization of the Queen through an arduous deconstruction of her womanly charms; she, presumably, having surrendered all earthly desires to rule over England. Historically, Elizabeth remained sexually active with various potential suitors well into her middle-age, including her ex-brother-in-law, Philip II of Spain, Archduke Charles of Austria, Eric XIV of Sweden, Adolphus, Duke of Holstein, and the Valois princes, Francis and Henry (a.k.a. King Henry III of France and Poland). Now, having established Elizabeth as a movie bearing little earthly resemblance to the historical record, it seems prudent – even necessary – to concede that it is nevertheless an immense melodrama, epic in scope, and even satisfying in its emotional intensity, despite the many historical liberties taken along the way.

Our story begins in earnest in the year 1558 with the arrival of the Catholic Queen Mary’s guardsmen to the stately Tudor manor of her exiled half-sister, the Protestant Elizabeth I - child of Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn. According Hirst’s revision, this Mary is a hysteric, suffering from a cancerous tumor in her uterus. Nevertheless, she is determined to rid her kingdom of all impediments that may topple her precarious toe-hold. Public burnings of suspected heretics and traitors to the crown are quite common, creating an atmosphere of fear and dissension. However, when Mary realizes she is dying, she has no choice but to release Elizabeth from the Tower of London and instate her to the English throne. This appointment is not without its sacrifices. Elizabeth has been entertaining romantic dalliances with ambitious statesman, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, an indulgence her trusted advisor, Sir William Cecil makes valiant attempts to discourage. The court is further rocked by news the Duke of Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston) plans to have Elizabeth murdered so he may assume a regency government. Enter Sir Francis Walsingham, a noble of spurious sexual proclivities, relentlessly loyal to the crown and soon to become the Queen’s private assassin.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, Mary of Guise is brokering a coup to conquer England with Norfolk's aid and complicity. As England draws nearer to the precipice of royal disaster, Elizabeth must harden her resolve and her heart against outside influences who may or may not have her best interests at heart. The palace intrigues condensed in Hirst's screenplay tend to pile up midway through this lavish spectacle – an otherwise, evenly paced potpourri of macabre alliances, faltering ambitions and maniacal machinations to take over England's throne from within. Presumably, to lend ballast to his fiction, Hirst has considerably aged many of the principles from life, Walsingham and William Cecil, actually in their twenties when Elizabeth began her reign. Also, the Norfolk of history was hardly an all-powerful demigod intent on destroying Elizabeth. In truth, he remained something of a rather easily manipulated pawn who first attempted to wed Mary of Guise in 1569. Finally, Elizabeth did not cleave her strawberry blonde tresses to ‘become’ the Virgin Queen. Rather, she wore a wig later in life, a disguise for her thinning tresses devastated by smallpox. Historical inaccuracies aside, there is much to admire in Elizabeth. The entire cast is superb – particularly Blanchett. Indeed, this movie made her an international star. Geoffrey Rush and Richard Attenborough add pedigree to the cast, as does Christopher Eccleston. Hirst's imaginative rewrite betrays history. The fiction, however, is nevertheless solid, and the production values afforded by John Myhre, with art direction by Jonathan Lee and Lucy Richardson, set decorations from Peter Howitt, and exquisite costuming from Alexandra Byrne go an awfully long way to impress and lull us away from history into this fanciful revisionist take. Those seeking a history lesson should seek it elsewhere. For those desiring a lusty tale of palace intrigues, Elizabeth fits the bill.

Originally released under the PolyGram label on DVD, and Blu-Ray, from Universal Home Entertainment, Uni now offers up a 4K ‘new to Blu’ that, while marginally pleasing, has its own deficits worth noting. Remi Adefarasin’s cinematography leans toward the Gordon Willis school – with whole portions of sets blacked out in inky shadows. This was partly done to obscure the fact Kapur needed more than his $25 million budget to give Elizabeth its lavish look. In lieu of this, Kapur found clever ways to reuse the same set, shooting from multiple angles, occasionally through gauze, or by candlelit only, or behind carved screens, constantly reframing the action on tighter shots rather than concentrating on the grand spectacle of the piece, only intermittently on display in this movie.

Nevertheless, the Uni 4K does not entirely resolve these finite details. While some of Elizabeth can be quite pleasing in 4K – the outdoor sequences are, for the most part, rather pleasing in their color saturation, textures and overall sharpness, the darker scenes that dominate this movie lean toward indistinguishable, with fine detail consumed, leaving – in some cases – floating heads in an abyss of blacks and browns. The stylized color palette here, favoring burnt oranges, crimson and Chinese reds, make it fairly impossible to rate the accuracy of flesh tonality, as everyone is under the jaundice-like afterglow of court candlelight or, in day scenes, bathed in a stylized bluey pallor, meant, I suspect, to infer the coldness and ambiguity of the times. The biggest shortcoming of this 4K release is detail. In close-up, it looks acceptable, but not extraordinary. In medium and long shot, there is very little – if any – overall improvement over Uni’s previously released standard Blu from 2010. 

The final sequence, in which Elizabeth prays to the Virgin Mary before, herself, becoming a virgin – wed to England – also has some extremely subtle, but as extremely curious gate weave, akin to watching an old analog TV broadcast with an airplane flying overhead to interrupt the signal. At first, I thought this might be due to director, Kapur shooting the sequence through candlelight, with the heat creating an ‘in camera’ mild distortion, but then I realized there were no perceivable candles in the shot. The final moments, where the newly virginized Elizabeth ascends to the throne, also exhibits a sudden desaturation in color. If I had to guess (and I am guessing here), I would suggest Uni has not performed a new scan off an original negative for this 4K release, but is still relying on scans created and sourced from the Blu, given an uptick in resolution merely by being transferred to 4K.

Again, it is just a guess. But Elizabeth in 4K does not look native 4K to me, either on a TV monitor or in projection. Uni has maintained the DTS 5.1 audio, excellent for this primarily dialogue-driven movie. Could the film in general, and David Hirschfelder’s monumental underscore, have sounded better, given a new Atmos mix? Probably. It didn’t get one. Extras have been ported over from the previous DVD release: an audio commentary from Kapur, more interested in discussing the technical aspects of the picture than its historical miscalculations, a nearly half-hour ‘making of’, the original 6-min. junket used to promote the movie and an original theatrical trailer. Bottom line: while Elizabeth – the movie, remains an anathema to history buffs, for the rest of us it provides the necessary high-stakes drama to impress as pure entertainment. The 4K is underwhelming. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

4.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

1