What saves this season of 'The Crown'
(CNN)Please note: the opinion below contains spoilers for Season 3 of "The Crown."
Period
dramas often like to pit female characters against each other. And when
Olivia Colman took over the role of Queen Elizabeth II from Claire Foy
in the hit Netflix series "The Crown," the re-casting was inevitably
going to invite comparisons between them. Colman was cast in the role before her Best Actress victory at this year's Oscars, but she was already a major TV star in Britain.
Kate Maltby
What
is a surprise twist, however, is to see showrunner Peter Morgan seize
on the real-world contest he has set up between two actresses and make
it part of the series' drama. That's exactly what happens in the first
few minutes of the show's third season. Forty-five-year-old
Colman-as-the-Queen emerges from shadows -- where, crowned and bewigged,
her silhouette is initially indistinguishable from that of Foy, who
played the role while in her early 30s -- to inspect a new design of
postal stamps bearing the sovereign's image. On one easel sits the new
image: Colman's own face. On another sits the previous official stamp,
ready to be replaced. There, Foy's youthful photograph stares back at
us.
It's
an oddly self-conscious moment -- a wink to the audience -- in a series
usually short on self-knowledge. Much of this series deals with the
subject of female aging and its impact: on Elizabeth, her sister,
Margaret, and even her mother-in-law, the paranoid schizophrenic
Princess Alice. For many British women and Olivia Colman fans worldwide,
it has been empowering to see her coming into the prime of her career
in middle age, when so many actresses are benched at the first sign of
crows' feet.
The opening
moments of that first episode feel almost like a mission statement: "The
Crown" is proud to put center stage a female character who is
unglamorous, unsexualized and aging into the wallpaper. "Age is rarely
kind to anyone," barks Colman with trademark Windsor stoicism. "Nothing
one can do about it. One just has to get on with it." If only "The
Crown" didn't feel the need to hark on it quite so much. For all these
good intentions, it's still obsessed with picking over the decline of a
woman's body.
Oscar-winner Olivia Colman steps in as Queen Elizabeth II in "The Crown."
Nor
is Colman's Queen much of a success story. In many instances, "The
Crown" is right to point out her failures. In 1966, she did indeed
hesitate far too long before she agreed to visit Aberfan,
the site of national tragedy when 116 young children and 28 adults were
killed in the collapse of a coal mining spoil-tip buried a primary
school in South Wales. (Many viewers will find this episode deeply
distressing.)
She did sanction her
family's disastrous decision to prevent a marriage between Prince
Charles and the young Camilla -- although in this version of events,
because Colman's Queen believes Camilla to be genuinely in love with her
future husband Andrew Parker Bowles, rather than because she shares the
Queen Mother's disapproval of Camilla's sexual past and commoner
status.
"There would always be
three people in the marriage," says Erin Doherty's Princess Anne of
Andrew Parker Bowles and any marriage between Charles and Camilla -- a
prefigurement of Princess Diana's famous use of the same phrase. Perhaps
in deference to the British heir apparent, "The Crown" writers are
over-keen to exonerate Charles from any responsibility himself.
But
at times, it seems Peter Morgan's series is so eager to find the
private woman behind the real-world public mystery that he ventures far
too deep into historical speculation and psychological fantasy. The
suggestion that Elizabeth and Margaret ever attempted a teenage exchange
of constitutional roles shows no understanding of Elizabeth's deep
instinct for duty, even in childhood. A personal revelation to Prime
Minister Harold Wilson that she has never been able to cry real tears
feels unbelievable and intrusive.
Nor
is there any evidence that the real-world Queen ever believed rumors
that Wilson was himself a Soviet spy. (Even though it gives Colman the
excuse for a wonderfully topical line: "I can't imagine what that would
be like. Having a Prime Minister one didn't trust." Filming schedules
for The Crown mean that it must have been filmed long before current
Prime Minister Boris Johnson was found by a UK court to have formally
misled the Queen over the prorogation of Parliament -- but it is still
deliciously apt.)
Eventually,
after Aberfan, the Queen does learn to cry. It is a moment of utter
cinematic cliché. (A moment of extreme national stereotyping doesn't
help: "You may wish to consider that this is Wales, not England,"
Elizabeth's private secretary reminds her. "A display of emotion would
not just be considered appropriate. It's expected.") But "The Crown,"
especially in this third season, has a tendency to serve up clichés
about royalty -- especially about female royalty.
In
the first episode, the middle-aged Elizabeth Windsor returns to her
older male mentor, Winston Churchill, and reminisces gratefully about
the wise teachings that allowed her to turn from naïve girl into mature
stateswoman. ("You were my guardian angel. The roof over my head. The
spine in my back. The iron in my heart. You were the compass that
steered and directed me.") Effective as a relationship model perhaps, if
we hadn't had it recently trotted out in PBS/ITV's "Victoria" as the
format for the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Prime
Minister Lord Melbourne. And if it weren't the blueprint for every film,
novel and TV series ever made about Elizabeth Tudor and her chief
minister William Cecil.
The veteran actress is enjoying a career peak in TV and movies.
What
saves this season of "The Crown," as in the first two, is the richness
of the cast of actors and the lusciousness of the money-no-object
design. Colman, even when handling the weakest scripts, is luminous. If
there's a touch here of some of her previous characters, it's in her
characteristic trick of letting human bitterness, venality or self-pity
slip through her teeth for a half-second, every once in a while, before
decency, politeness and a desperate, lonely desire to be liked shutter
back down over her surface.
To
British viewers, Colman is still familiar as Sophie Chapman, the
unloved, much-abused on-off girlfriend of one of the two main characters
in the dark sitcom "Peep Show." To her fans, Colman's emergence as a
bigger star than each of the two male leads, David Mitchell and Robert
Webb, is a feminist happy ending. (Both Mitchell and Webb are highly
talented, well-deserved successes and Webb has written a superb feminist memoir of masculinity.
Nonetheless, their career followed a familiar British mold: male-comedy
duo; met at Cambridge; landed their own TV show; added a woman as the
love interest.)
If there's a
trajectory from Sophie Chapman to Elizabeth Windsor, it's in Colman's
understanding of the way peculiarly English forms of politeness are used
as a weapon by the most miserable of women, or as a defensive armor to
superimpose over profound personal pain. Colman's knack for an earnest
formal smile -- all teeth, no eyes -- is working overtime here.
Helena Bonham Carter, center, plays Princess Margaret.
Tobias
Menzies, too, is perfectly cast as Prince Philip, although he appears
to be doing an occasionally uncanny voice impression of his predecessor
in the role, Matt Smith. Helen Bonham Carter is playing Helena Bonham
Carter -- which makes her a fine stand-in for Princess Margaret. (Bonham
Carter claims to have spoken to
a spectral Princess Margaret via a psychic, who told her to "get the
smoking right." If nothing else, she does hold a cigarette holder here
at a perfect Margaret angle.)
Samuel
West steals the first episode as Anthony Blunt, the real Soviet spy.
Emerald Fennell, who appears toward the end of the series as Camilla,
perfectly captures her earthy maternalism.
Charles
Edwards, one of the best British actors working today, also provides
strong support as the Queen's favorite secretary, Martin Charteris. But
his role was played by Henry Hadden-Paton previously, and at times it
feels a distraction that The Crown has aged-up the series by recasting
not only the leading actors, but even the minor players. Alex Jennings'
Duke of Windsor becomes Derek Jacobi; Will Keane's Michael Adeane
becomes David Rintoul. Greg Wise's Earl Mountbatten becomes Charles
Dance (who is, as ever, playing to type).
It
isn't always necessary visually and adds to the sense of disjunction
between this season and the previous two. Only John Lithgow, in a
one-episode encore as Winston Churchill, makes a return.
Nonetheless,
one remaining constant throughout this series and the last two is Peter
Morgan's innate understanding of the contradictions of the British
monarchy. And as Colman grows a little dowdier, a little more domestic,
so her Elizabeth Windsor grows more comfortably into the role of
constitutional monarch.
In 1559,
shortly after her namesake Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne, the
loyalist priest John Aylmer wrote a defense of female monarchy, in
answer to John Knox's notorious anti-women pamphlet, "The First Blast of
the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women." Aylmer didn't
dissent from Tudor orthodoxy about conventional gender roles. But in
England, Aylmer argued, a woman could rule even while she lacked the
dynamism and authority of a man -- because England, uniquely, would
always be a "mixed" or constitutional monarchy, where a wise (male)
House of Commons, House of Lords and Privy Council could guide a monarch
and make up for deficiencies.
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Aylmer
was writing 400 years before the events of "The Crown," 450 years
before our own day. But even today, male royals have chafed harder than
women against the limitations of a monarchy that promises power but
offers it only indirectly.
Colman's
Queen Elizabeth is conventional enough to accept the gendered
expectations of a mid-century British woman and royal enough to seize
whatever limited power that offers as her due. Confronting Dance's
Mountbatten over his role in an abortive anti-democratic coup, she
bridles at his refusal to "stand by and do nothing" about Prime Minister
Wilson's failures.
Reminding
him of the royal family's role in public life, she tells him: "Doing
nothing is exactly what we do. And bide our time."
This queen does nothing, magnificently.
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