Emma Stone in The Favourite, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight.
2018’s The Favourite is probably director Yorgos Lanthimos’ most accessible and straightforward film. Which is to say, it’s still pretty fucking weird and features extended use of bunny rabbits as a symbolic motif.
I am a sucker for a good period piece, and the production design delivers a detailed and exquisite recreation of the world of 18th century British gentry. They live a lazy, opulent lifestyle - lounging in country estates, shooting, eating, racing ducks and casually debating the War of Spanish Succession, with the lives of hundreds of thousands of people hanging in the balance, with the casual indifference of a pampered ruling class for which global war is mostly a matter of national pride that rarely rises above an abstraction.
While this beautifully textured recreation of a time and place, and its brutal depiction of the off-handed callousness of the ruling class, adds a wonderful depth and dimension to the film, the real meat of the story is the triumvirate of Queen Anne, her close confidant Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and a young up-start at court, Abigail Hill. The film is fairly bold for featuring three strong and complex female characters jockeying with one another for status and power, while the male characters, to the extent they feature in the narrative at all, are relegated to the sidelines as foppish jokes, villainous cods or useless tools to be manipulated by the female characters.
Based loosely on actual history - and what is history really, but an impression of how things happened shaped by those powerful enough to control the narrative - the movie is anchored by Queen Anne (Olivia Colman, who bagged an Oscar for the role), a weak monarch in mental decline who uses her position to command the attention of strong, cunning women. When the film opens, Sarah (Rachel Weisz) is the de facto power at court, exerting control over the Queen with a variety of wiles, including seduction. Abigail (Emma Stone), a poor relation, arrives at court literally covered in shit and soon begins to challenge this hierarchy, proving to be an adept ladder-climber.
The machinations between these three characters as they seek to exploit, manipulate and destroy one another makes up the spine of the film, and it is delightful to watch them scheme against each other in the basest of ways. Even Queen Anne, an almost comically out-sized depiction of excess and debauchery with a generous splash of mental illness, is wily enough to leverage her position in order to extract sexual and emotional gratification from her courtiers in exchange for access to power. They are clever, they are ruthless and they use the tools are their disposal to get what they want.
So, typically films are evaluated on three elements: plot, setting and character. When these things are executed well, a good film will also explore interesting or important themes in an illuminating way. When all these pistons are firing at the same time, the result is great cinema. When one or more element lets you down, you often wind up with a mess. A film that tries to be a serious exploration of power structures in 18th century Britain, but that does so with paper thin or badly acted or written characters, will erode its own credibility to comment intelligently on the themes it purports to tackle.
Not so with The Favourite. The world-building is careful, lush and engrossing. The characters are complex, strong, cleverly written and acted brilliantly by top talent. The plot is fiendish and propulsive, hardly ever lagging - it wastes no time, for instance, in useless backstory for Abigail, but just plops her down in court covered in shit and lets her very existence upend the existing power and social structures like a force of nature turned loose on an unsuspecting town.
Because these elements are carried off so skillfully, the things the movie is trying to comment on - the callous disinterest of the ruling class, the way ambition breeds manipulation in the quest for proximity to power, the bloat and debauchery of powerful people - they feel important, and it feels like the film has something important to say about them. What that is exactly, well that is open to interpretation, especially with a filmmaker like Lanthimos who delights in the weird and wonderful ambiguity of art. But I would wager that whatever the movie is trying to say about these themes, bunnies are an integral part.