In the Flesh: The Favourite

There's an emotional distance to Yorgos Lanthimos' films, whether it's the stylistically flattened affect of The Lobster or the haunting, stunted range of Dogtooth. His latest, The Favourite, may be quicker and more expressive with its dialogue and hew a little more raw than his other work, but that clinical remove is still there. In his fisheyed, bulging shots of Queen Anne's palace (the real-life Hatfield House) and his cool but never dull or stately party scenes, this serves him well. Applied to the tangle of political ambition and emotional immaturity at the film's center, it loses much of its appeal.

The lesbian love triangle around which the film revolves suffers, unfortunately, from uneven plotting and characterization. Weisz, already a sex symbol to any girl who grew up with The Mummy, has the charisma and material to make the prickly, bellicose Duchess of Marlborough flare and crackle. Her costuming is exceptional, mannishly rakish in one scene, ferociously feminine in the next. Her relationship to the queen, too, is fascinating, their childhood dynamic splitting under pressure as Sarah spends less and less time with her lover and more enjoying the pleasures of the court. By comparison, Emma Stone as Abigail Hill is a series of flat cliches cohered around a dully sardonic and detached performance. As her character replaces Sarah in the queen's favor the film loses its edge, devolving into emotional emptiness.

As Queen Anne, Olivia Colman gives a really tremendous performance. Infantile, stubborn to the point of self-destruction, boundlessly loving and hungry to be loved. While the film certainly paints her as grotesque, ravaged by gout, stuffing her face with cake she knows will make her vomit, it also takes care to give her moments of soft beauty. When the camera switches from her lover Lady Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) performing an elaborate dance to Anne watching in silence from her wheelchair, her wet stare and trembling lip are rendered sensual, vulnerable. It's a complex and human treatment you don't often see granted to a fat body. Her quiet reminiscence over the seventeen children she's lost is deeply affecting, and it places the film's frequent roving, low-angle shots in a dramatically different context. They highlight the grotesqueries of the cast, both moral and physical, yes, but from a child's point of view. Each shot is a ghost of the court that might have been.

From a promising start, The Favourite devolves into a surprisingly plain story. The emotional punch of its final sequence, in which a furious Anne forces Abigail to rub her legs as she did when she was a servant and faces overlay the screen in stoic denial as rabbits populate the shot in dizzying profusion, isn't enough to elevate the previous hour of social climbing. If Stone's character or performance had more to it, perhaps the idea of her envelopment by the Queen's strange, sad little world would hold more weight.