Mary, Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke, 2018)

[domino harvey]

Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I in Mary Queen of Scots, though I wouldn't unspoiler if I was you...

SpoilerShow

[Big Ben]

She looks overly stylized to me, almost how I might view a caricature of someone from the UK. I cannot believe they'll make her look that uncouth in the film.

[mfunk9786]

I wouldn’t base too much on a paparazzi photo taken with a zoom lens with regard to how it is going to look on film, Big Ben. Remember this?

[DarkImbecile]

Trailer

[domino harvey]

Ronan is awful in what we see here, I'd remove her from any longterm Oscar predix

[Kirkinson]

I wouldn't make any hasty judgments about the whole of her performance based on that trailer, but I will say there is something surprisingly off-putting about hearing her attempt to speak with a Scottish accent! Maybe it's different for folks from the UK & Ireland, but to my American ears it's like some kind of linguistic uncanny valley.

[ng4996]

I have a few Scottish friends, and the few who care about films were praising Ronan's accent in the trailer. Personally I'm very excited for this, I think she'll be typically excellent.

[DarkImbecile]

I've been predicting that she was winning an Oscar for this for 10 months now, so I'm just not going to watch this trailer and keep the dream alive.

[mfunk9786]

I have a few Scottish friends, and the few who care about films were praising Ronan's accent in the trailer. Personally I'm very excited for this, I think she'll be typically excellent.

Reception to the trailer on social media also seems very positive. This is so incredibly far from the kind of film I ever would want to watch so I'll probably never know how anyone is in it one way or the other.

[Lost Highway]

I can't see anything wrong with Ronan's performance or accent from the two minutes here but this does look rather camp.

[Roger Ryan]

I watched the 1971 version with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson just a couple of weeks ago and it was campy and poorly plotted. Nobody fared well in it except Trevor Howard, who was given plenty of bon mots to deliver which he did with ease. Redgrave (as the title character) seemed miscast and I'm thinking it might be a similar situation with Ronan. It's not a subject I'm interested in seeing played out again any time soon.

[Kirkinson]

I am 100% willing to accept that I probably had no idea what I was talking about with the accent comment.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

I am 100% willing to accept that I probably had no idea what I was talking about with the accent comment.

It is wavering at best. Apart from the fact that she spent her childhood in France and only returned to Scotland as a young adult having married into the French court it is even debatable whether she shouldn't have been given a French accent. Any vestige of Scottish accent would have been in the raw Scots dialect anyway as opposed to the attempt at English with a strain of diplomatic Scottish accent employed here. However that would probably be totally untenable for a mainstream film.

[Never Cursed]

This was...not remotely close to the overlong, oscar bait-y sort of bad movie that I expected it to be. I might even venture to say that it was all right, and that it genuinely had something to say about the personal and political dimensions of being a powerful woman at a specific place and time. Sure, the movie's overcut and sometimes ugly in a digital way and saddled with an unimpressive "main" performance (Ronan has more screentime than Robbie, who is much better in her smaller role), but it also spends a lot of time addressing how its two central figures balanced their goals and their country's needs as politicians with societal demands of them as women and societal reactions to their supposed expressions of femininity. Moments like Ronan's big sex scene, wherein she persuades/coerces her closeted husband into impregnating her, are neither mechanical period recreations nor cheap or lurid exploitations of the female characters but, rather, are realistic and oftentimes sad expressions of the desires of the central characters.

To give some context to the pictures/discussion that started the thread (none of this is really a spoiler at all, but I'll spoilertag out of an abundance of caution):

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The movie repeatedly highlights how Mary of Scots and Elizabeth I dealt aesthetically and personally with health and beauty issues as they related to their appearances as rulers. Early on, we see how Ronan and her servants react to and clean up after her period comes early, and the pictures above are taken from a scene set after Robbie recovers from an awful case of smallpox. As she ages, the scars left from the illness get worse and worse, and she applies more and more white makeup to hide them as the movie progresses. In the climactic scene of the movie (the only scene with the two leads together), a one-on-one conversation between the two leads, Robbie talks about how she personally prepared for them to meet by commissioning an elaborate outfit and wig with excessive makeup so as not to "destroy" Ronan's image of her, and one gets the sense that the rivalry of the two queens was motivated just as much by Robbie's professional and personal jealousy of Ronan as a leader/woman as much as it was motivated by the rivalry between nations. Now, this doesn't exactly work in the movie as I think it was intended, since Ronan doesn't sell admirable confidence in the same way that Robbie sells a lack thereof (and this is why I think her performance is flawed), but there's a lot more going on here than an unpleasant costume drama catfight (cough cough, The Favourite), and, to directly address some comments made about Robbie's appearance in the pictures above, she's deliberately made ugly for much of this movie not to caricature her or for the sake of shallow jokes, but in the service of larger points regarding her character as a ruler and a person.