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Whatever Happened to Mary?

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It had been a few weeks since I checked out what Netflix had to offer in the way of new movies and I was pleasantly surprised to find Mary, Queen of Scots.  I had long wanted to watch this 2018 movie, which had received relatively favorable reviews, but I was surprised that no critics referenced Schiller's Mary Stuart.  He is the one who set up the fictitious meeting between the rival queens in his early 19th century play to determine the fate of the British Isles.  Beau Willimon, the screenwriter, had obviously read it as he used the play as the basis for his political game of thrones, playing the two queens off each other as one would a chess match.

Whereas Schiller presented a more tightly defined script centered on the Scottish queen's last days in an English jail, Willimon decides to spread his action far and wide, encompassing all of Mary's 25-year reign on the throne, while Elizabeth tried to figure out what to do with her troublesome cousin, before leaving it up to her lords to decide the Catholic pretender's fate.  Unfortunately for Margot Robbie, Saoirse Ronan steals the movie.  Maybe that's the way it was intended, as Willimon made Mary a far more compelling figure than the pox-ridden English queen.  Schiller too had a soft spot for Mary, making us wish the two queens could have found some common ground even if history tells us otherwise.

This was really the beginning of the end for Scotland.  It's once proud Gaelic culture was already being trampled by Protestant ministers like John Knox, who not only wanted to root out all the Catholicism in the kingdom, but impose the English language on the northern half of the island.  Then along comes Mary to literally reign on his parade after he had drawn her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, to the Protestant faith.  It's not like Mary was against Protestantism per se, but she was Catholic and many in the royal inner circle felt she was nothing more than a pawn of the Pope, including her half-brother.  After Mary's execution in 1587, Scotland would never be the same again.

The problem with the movie is that meanders all over the place without really offering us any real sense of all these internal conflicts.  Maybe that is because Willimon was limited to writing a script for a two-hour movie when a lavish biography of this nature would have been better served as a limited series.  However, I get the feeling that if Willimon had been given more space to spread out the story, he would have just turned into another House of Cards, focusing on all the political intrigues which seems to excite him the most.

For me, the death of Mary Stuart represented the end of Gaelic culture in Scotland.  You could argue that she was only Gaelic by birth, having grown up in France, but she could speak Scottish Gaelic, even if she was most comfortable speaking French.  From most accounts, Mary was quite tolerant of the strong Protestant influence on her native land, but as tensions grew became less tolerant. Given how John Knox is presented in this movie, it is easy to see why.

King Henry VIII had been determined to put Scotland under his yoke.  First, he tried to entice a marriage between Edward and Mary, who was just an infant when she inherited the throne. When his Treaty of Greenwich was rejected, he chose to do so by force in a series of pitched battles before his untimely death in 1546.  His son Edward inherited the thrown but didn't have a very long reign.  Eventually, Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1558.  The battle for Scotland having continued throughout this time.

Willimon depicts the Earl of Moray as being sympathetic to English interests, thinking that this would save Scotland from total usurpation.  The Earl is upset when Mary tramples over all his best laid plans by antagonizing Knox and marrying Lord Danley, who also has an eye for the male lute player that is part of the queen's court. There are any number of amusing scenes during this courtship and subsequent marriage, not least of all the dandy princeling trying to figure out which of the young women is the real Mary, but it all goes south from there.  We are forced to trudge through all the attempts at reconciliation between the two queens before Elizabeth finally decides enough is enough and has Mary imprisoned for treason.

The two never met face to face.  Elizabeth didn't want to recognize Mary as a rightful heir to the throne, but Schiller offered a marvelous "what if" situation in his early 19th century play.  Willimon does the same but the viewer had to wait much too long for it transpire and is worn out at that point.  You just want this damn movie to end.

Still, much credit goes to Ms. Ronan for providing a wide range of emotions in her portrayal of Mary Stuart.  Poor Margot, a good actress in her own right, was left to play the villain with no good explanation as to why she would relent to having her darling cousin beheaded. Willimon could have done much better in this regard, even with his limited time frame.

That means Mary Stuart is still available for some other enterprising writer-director team to explore in better depth.  You don't need to take in the full width and breadth of her reign.  It's enough to focus on one aspect of her tumultuous life and give it the fullness it deserves.  This was the case with The Favorite, a movie that came out the same year, which offered us a very compelling miniature of Queen Anne in the battle for her affection.

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