“The Favourite” a Mixed Bag with Strong Performances

Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (C+) is a bawdy tale of women behaving very badly, set in early 18th century Britain under the reign of Queen Anne, and its fine acting and perversely wicked sense of humor against the backdrop of a royal costume drama are not enough to recommend it. Rachel Weisz is delicious as the Duchess of Marlborough, confidant, advisor and secret lover to the queen. Enter Emma Stone, the duchess’s younger cousin from a disgraced side of the family, who works her way from scullery maid to the royal inner circle. The actress is fittingly stone cold in her role as ruthless protagonist vying for affections of the monarch. Sometimes at the center of it all and sometimes like a character in her own universe, Olivia Colman plays an utterly idiosyncratic queen, flanked by a mini kingdom of rabbits representing her deceased children and wailing from gout pain as she slithers, rolls and tumbles through a palace filmed in fisheye lenses. The grotesquerie of oneupmanship is often amusing but also often pretentious and pointless. Like the queen at the center of the story, the puckish director has fashioned imperial clothing of tonal delirium, and it doesn’t wear well for long.

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