#Imovie review 2018 movie
The movie plays out as a clawingly competitive political-erotic triangle between Abigail, Sarah, and the queen, with a few key men as supporting scoundrels. “The Favourite” is a sick-joke morality play in which the message is: Every woman has her reasons.Ībigail and Sarah are like Jane Austen characters for whom ambition has been heightened into killer instinct. Yet the trick of her performance is that even as we see what a schemer she is, we don’t necessarily recoil. Stone makes her sweet and graceful on the surface, with a heart of tick-tock calculation. But Lady Sarah puts her to work as a scullery maid, and it’s there that Abigail, with her grace and charm intact, begins to plot her rise. He even gambled away Abigail, who arrives at the castle with nothing (she’s even dunked in manure). (She’s devoted to her pet bunny rabbits.) So Lady Sarah rules her from the sidelines, telling the queen what to do, even when it comes to the controversial war with France that England is embroiled in.Įnter Abigail (Stone), Sarah’s cousin, who was once a lady herself, but whose father gambled away his fortune and his good name. She’s a woman of swirling emotion, but not all there. She suffers a rash of ailments, which hobble her spirit, but the health problems play as emanations of her depression. Weisz, reuniting with Lanthimos after “The Lobster,” is Lady Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, who has grown up as the trusted servant and confidante of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), a ruler who, to put it mildly, is not in good shape. In essence, the movie is a tooth-and-claw duel of elegant backstabbing that plays out between two cousins, played with contrasting styles of devious finesse by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone. It’s poised to be a specialty hit and an awards player. “The Favourite” revels in its posh inhumanity, but that only makes it seem in tune with the times. Our society, if anything, is in a darker place now than it was when “Barry Lyndon” or “Dangerous Liaisons” came out. “The Favourite,” written with icy eloquence by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara and directed by Lanthimos with a lavish cunning that shows off what a craftsman he can be, is good enough to qualify as a jaded gem. Yet there’s a place in the universe for this sort of Masterpiece Theatre of Doom cutthroat classicism every once in a while, it can be a toxic tonic. Yes, it’s one of those movies: a vision of life in which epigrams are daggers, everyone is scheming against everyone else, and manners are the thin veneer of civilization that force people to act like “polite” hypocrites.
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