robert carlyle film festival: gunpowder, treason and plot

(2004. dir: Gillies MacKinnon) It's a miniseries in two halves: the first about Mary, Queen of Scots and her doomed reign, the second about James and the plot against his life.

The second half is better than the first, partly due to its sparsely-used but effective soliloquy-to-the-camera device. The writing has more flair; the author was more inspired. Both halves are well-acted: Clemence Poesy (In Bruges) gives a good Mary despite some weakly-written speeches early on, and Kevin McKidd is a tough and passionate Bothwell, a Bothwell for whom any queen might throw over her throne. Michael Fassbender in the second is stoical perfection as the hardcore Guy Fawkes. Clubfooted, twisted, psychically bent, Carlyle is intense and exact, his King James a walking anxiety attack. His relationships with his wife (Sira Stampe) and with his inherited advisor, Lord Cecil (Tim McInnerny) are well-plotted and unpredictable, and the scene in which he manages to fluster the unflusterable Cecil by suggesting they allow the Catholics to go ahead and destroy his loathesome Parliament is simultaneously chilling and laugh-out-loud funny, particularly to any American familiar with our own ridiculous Congress.

Historical dramas about royals rarely feel true to me; I think it's hard enough to grasp the weird abnormality of the lives of kings, doubly hard to do so in an alien era. This one does a fair job (better with James than with Mary, whose romance with Bothwell seems a little too romantic, and whose moments of leisure tend to seem a little staged). You get absurdities like an expensive coronation in a broken economy, all in the rain, with a plague threatening London, everybody miserable, even the king and his family. You get two devastatingly effective and miserable wedding nights: the first Mary's to Darnley (an odiously good Paul Nicholls), a depiction that feels horribly veracious, and then James' with his Anne, which is no more palatable but at least perhaps less of a shock.

There is one scene in the second half which feels untrue, a plot-turn involving James convincing a courtier to sacrifice his "honor" in a particularly degrading fashion in return for a promise to restore dignity to Catholics at large. It is contrived and playwrighterly, but the rest of the Gunpowder Plot story flows at a romping pace and captures some crucial, extramundane whiff of that lost moment whose resonance can still be heard rumbling to this very day.