Mary, Queen of Scots

The history of Mary, Queen of Scots is so filled with incident it can read like fiction.  Murders, spies, exile, Game of Throne-style intrigue — and, if you believe the romantics, a star-crossed love affair.  You'd think it would be impossible to make a dull movie out of her life… but, it seems, human ingenuity is endless.

Out of all this interesting material, the movie Mary, Queen of Scots concentrates on Mary’s relationship with her cousin, Elizabeth I, and especially Elizabeth’s envy of Mary’s beauty.  Since both characters are played by your average-looking Hollywood stars— i.e. people more stunning than anyone you’ve ever met in your life — the dialog frequently wanders off into the absurd.  “Oh, how I wish I was as beautiful as Mary,” Elizabeth says, staring at her perfect image in the mirror.  (Not an actual quote from the movie — I didn’t know I would hate it enough to write a review and didn’t take notes.  But it’s how her character is shown to feel.)  At the end, the filmmakers are reduced to showing Elizabeth in clown makeup: flat white skin, two circles of red blush, and a wig in a shade of magenta that would become popular among punks four hundred years later.  Yes, it’s true that she hid her smallpox scars with makeup, but there aren’t any portraits that show her looking like Bozo.

Part of the problem is that the movie has an agenda: Mary is concerned and caring, Elizabeth cold, brittle, envious, unfeeling.  In support of this, Mary sometimes sounds like a present-day liberal, in favor of homosexuality and cross-dressing and tolerance toward other religions.  Which would be fine if she wasn’t also shown as a devout Catholic, and if these weren’t all things the Church has come out strongly against.  If she truly thought so little of Catholic dogma, she might as well have become Protestant and saved herself and Scotland a lot of trouble.

Weirdly, though, the movie sort of ends up making Elizabeth’s point.  She didn’t get married because she thought that anyone she took as a husband would want to be more than just her consort, that he’d scheme to become king and maybe even try to get rid of her.  Then Mary does get married, to a man who wants to be more than her consort, and who schemes to become king… 

And, objectively, Elizabeth was a better queen, guiding her country through several rebellions, a change of religion, the plague, and the Spanish Armada, and into what most historians consider a Golden Age.  Meanwhile Mary lost her husbands, her throne, and, eventually, her life.  (Not a spoiler; the movie starts with her beheading.)  But we’re shown nothing about how Elizabeth ruled England, just her endless nattering about appearance.

Unlike the filmmakers, though, I don’t think it’s necessary to show Mary as a failure to make Elizabeth look better by comparison.  In my opinion Mary only had one major flaw, but it was a pretty big one for a ruler: she made terrible choices.  Meanwhile Elizabeth thought slowly and carefully about her decisions.  She agonized over Mary’s death warrant, partly on the principle that if you can kill one queen you can kill them all, and later she would say she was tricked into signing it, but the movie, with its agenda of Elizabeth bad, Mary good, shows none of this.  Her caution had her advisers tearing their hair out, but in the end she was shown to be right.  And hey — there’s a contrast that might make for an interesting movie.