jjcarr-49015

As a fan of the original film, I approached this remake with some trepidation, having read some negative reviews. It wasn't quite as bad as I feared it might be. Its chief problem is that it isn't a patch on the original. For one thing the cast in the remake can't compare with that of the original which contained four men who had or would win acting Oscars plus a fifth who was nominated for his performance in that original. Several of them had seen active service in WW2 so they knew about life and death situations. It in remake we get a larger cast including a token female and assorted ethnicities. They're younger and prettier and none of their skins or hands blister after days working in the Gobi sun. In the original several of the characters have depth. In the remake they're one dimensional. More seriously the plot isn't as well worked as in the original. In the original Dorfmann has a reason for being at the well. In the remake we're told Elliot just showed up at a test rig in the middle of Mongolia while hitchhiking around the world. They could have had him visiting a brother who got killed in the crash. Much of the tension between the two central characters is diluted in the remake. At one point Elliot says that he's the only indispensable person bit, of course, Towns is also so we should have had the Dorfmann/Towns confrontation when Towns decides to bring back the man who's walked off. For me the bests parts of the original are the twin scenes where we learn what Dorfmann didn't bother to tell Towns and the others and then his genuine anger at their anger. These scenes are beautifully and believably acted by Jimmy Stewart, Dicky Attenborough and Hardy Kruger. Stewart and Attenborough convincingly play men who think they're going to die. Kruger convincingly plays a man who's genuinely offended that his competence is questioned. In the remake we get the reveal and the reaction in one scene which isn't handled nearly as well. If you haven't seen the original do yourself a favour and don't watch the remake first. The only good reason I could give for watching the remake is to see how the same story can be told well and badly.

While I did know the basic history of Mary and Elizabeth, I knew little about this film before watching it so I was surprised to see a black actor playing a Tudor lord to be followed by an ethnically Chinese Bess of Hardwick. After that it was hard to take what followed seriously, not that it particularly deserves to be. Director Josie Rourke stated that: "I was really clear, I would not direct an all-white period drama." In which case, why bother? Suppose she'd been offered the greatest script in history, covering the Nazi inner circle. Would she have turned it down unless she could have a Haitian Hess and a Ghanaian Göring? Somehow, I doubt it. I suspect she'd be happy with all-white baddies, provided they were white and heterosexual and cis. Now there were some Africans in Tudor England but they were servants or tradespeople not lords or ladies. In a sense the director didn't make a period drama. It's ahistorical and not very dramatic, given a very dramatic subject. Mary' life can be divided into three acts. Her first 19 years before she returns from France, her 6 tumultuous years as reigning queen and her final 19 years as Elizabeth's prisoner. The film basically covers only those middle 6 years. A problem anyone telling Mary's story is the same as that facing a film about the Third Crusade. The two central protagonists never met. So, the movie's makers invent a farcically filmed one. Josie Rourke is a stage director and the scene which might have worked in a theatre struck me as ham-fisted on film. Then the movie skips over the next 19 years to a rushed ending. It's a bit like a Hitler movie showing the run up to WW2 then skipping from the invasion of Poland straight to the bunker. I suspect the filmmakers were less interested in telling Mary's true tale than in getting two woke women together.