The Favourite

At long last B. and I saw The Favourite last night, which I had been especially wanting to see since Howard Adelman posted a two-part blog in December about how much he hated it, and I would've wanted to see anyway because Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster I think is probably my second-favourite movie of the 21st century, and almost certainly my second-favourite not directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. After watching The Lobster I said to B. that this guy really likes Stanley Kubrick; in the opening moments of The Favourite I realized that Lanthimos had made a Barry Lyndon here. (There's a recurring piece of chamber music on the soundtrack of The Favourite that I thought might be a bit from the Schubert piece Kubrick uses to such great effect in Barry Lyndon, but it turns out (despite the fact that Uncle Wikipedia currently believes, mistakenly as far as I can tell, that the Schubert op. 100 trio is in The Favourite) it's actually a Schumann quartet, which runs together with it in my mind because I got Naxos historical recordings of both of them around the same time.) But in the end I think this movie is too little Barry Lyndon (and I kind of think that making a Barry Lyndon kind of movie is probably a mistake for Lanthimos anyway--at first I thought his characteristically alienating wooden dialogue would be right at home here, but it's so much at home that it disappears; it's kind of like if the TV show Kings had been set in biblical Israel (although, that said, people who complain about anachronisms in the dialogue are not tuned in to what Lanthimos is doing))--it would have been stronger if it was a three-and-a-half-hour-long movie about Abigail and followed her from childhood, rather than making her the pivot point of a triangle along with Queen Anne and Lady Sarah Churchill (who, funnily enough, that I recall, is never called by that name in the film but rather is usually referred to as Lady Marlborough (or Queen Anne's unexplained pet name for her, Mrs. Freeman--when Lady Marlborough first addresses the queen by her pet name "Mrs. Morley" I was a bit confused as to whether she was actually the queen or not)--and too much Phantom Thread (which, like The Favourite, is, while interesting and certainly a good movie, for me the director's most disappointing (I found Boogie Nights tedious, but I didn't expect to like it)), poisoning and all. (Lanthimos also borrows the scornfully practical marital handjob from Anderson's The Master.) As Howard says, the irony of a movie like this being held up for praise in these times for its "strong women" is that it is profoundly misogynist: these women are bad people (which reminds me of what I said a few years ago about the idea of Margaret Laurence's Hagar being a feminist hero).

The obvious common element between Lanthimos, Kubrick, and Anderson is the difficulty of connection--not exactly disconnection but often tragic or perverse struggles to connect. Which leads me to "Comfortably Numb", which is in my head, and which has tended to come up these last years when ( I'm feeling cut closest to the bone. )