By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to 1998’s Elizabeth, the acclaimed historical epic that made a superstar out of Aussie actress Cate Blanchett.
Amongst the sparkling glitterati of the Australian film industry, Cate Blanchett is something close to a sacred cow, an actress upon whom praise is lavished with unrivalled fervour. Everyone loves “our Cate”, from the critics who get all hot and heavy about her, and the local actors and directors desperate to work with her, to the politicians way too eager to listen to her blather on about the environment (amongst a host of other “right on” causes), and the hoi polloi of the drama scene who continue to genuflect about what she’s done for local theatre.
Yeah, whatever. Does anyone else out there think that Cate’s just a massive, haemorrhoidal pain in the arse? She’s there in support of all the fashionable causes, and she’s at all the big events, making out like she’s “just one of us” while tarted up in a specially made dress from one of “the world’s biggest designers” that probably costs more than what most people would earn in a year. She bangs on about the state of the Australian film industry, yet has only really made one movie here in the last couple of decades, instead choosing to appear in meaningless Hollywood rubbish like Black Bag, Borderlands, Ocean’s Eight and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.
It’s all about the work, right? Anyway, that’s beside the point…let’s talk about the acting. Shekhar Kapur’s turgid historical epic Elizabeth (starring that other overrated and now cancelled Aussie thesp, Geoffrey Rush) is considered by many to feature La Blanchett’s finest performance, but her turn as fired up, ranga royal Queen Elizabeth I is nothing short of an exercise in pure, unadulterated self-indulgence. Blanchett is just as shrill, mannered, and over-the-top as ever, hollering her lines as if she desperately needs to communicate with the punters in the cheap seats at an imaginary theatre that she’d probably like to be the director of.
That said, it’s far better than the pantomime, ham-job, uni revue-level impersonations that she tossed up as Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator and Bob Dylan (or something) in I’m Not There. Queen Cate? A right, royal tosser more like it…
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
