Nathaniel reporting from the New York Film Festival
"Bunnies aren't just cute like everyone supposes," the vengeance demon Anya famously sang on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you should know straightaway that she would absolutely recoil at The Favourite, which is filled with bunnies, even as she might well relate to the brutal practicalities of the social maneuvering between the servant Abigail (Emma Stone) and her cousin Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) for the Queen's affections. Yet the two things, bunnies and favouritism, are inextricably linked.
Queen Anne's (Olivia Colman) chambers are filled with bunnies, seventeen to be precise, each named after one of her miscarried or stillborn babies. She would very much like her favourite Lady, whoever it is, to fawn on them...
In this matter Sarah will not comply, telling her longtime friend and Queen at the beginning of the film that even love has its limits. Abigail, on the other hand, will plop right down on the floor to play with them once she's managed some highly coveted alone time with the Queen. Some people hide their scars but Queen Anne fawns on hers -- twitchy furry and hopping -- and routinely celebrates them. She lets them roam wild in her room, especially on their "birthdays". And that's quite enough about the plot because The Favourite's pleasures are many, and often surprising, particularly in the way that practically every moment, conversation, slight, success, secret, gossip, or letter shifts the power dynamic in the wider Court and in the Queen's bedchamber, which she rarely vacates for long given both her ill health and her volatile moods.
Director Yorgo Lanthimos, working for the first time with someone else's words (the razor sharp screenplay comes courtesy of Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara), deploys his ace team of collaborators with superb effect, each either emphasizing or counterbalancing the ever-shifting ground beneath the characters. The production design is marvelously expansive making each room and corridor both enclosed and vast and ripe with drama. The cinematography, often deploying fish eye lenses or shooting from odd angles or in obscuring candle light, continually distort the images but the effect is so consistent that it's also weirdly steadying. And last, but certainly not least, the costumes by Sandy Powell provide a genius mix of historically accurate (silhouettes) and expressively modern (fabric) that free the film from the 'costume drama' cage, as often as the seventeen bunnies are loosed.
Yorgos Lanthimos tremendously assured direction and three brilliant actresses, continually astound for their ability to both place you in their confidence and repel you. Lady Sarah is the hardest to "like" outright but Weisz plays her with so much intelligence and confidence that the suspicion that you might be wrong about her nags at your own discomfort with her cruelty. Queen Anne is a mess but Colman plays her with such comic gusto and pathos, that you'd probably humiliate yourself to be in her favor, too. This push and pull is true even of Abigail, who enters the picture as its sweetest soul. Even then before all the shenanigans begin, Stone plays her with a slyly dichotomous blend of sincerity and shameless opportunism. Throughout the film, as the power dynamic shifts you're continually compelled to reassess your own feelings about each woman, and even what you thought of that earlier scene you liked so much.
Who's zooming who, exactly? Maybe we're all willingly duped, given our particular vanities and fickleness, just as often as we're shadily misled!
One of the most telling and inspired mini-scenes in the film is a bit wherein Queen Anne stuffs her face to the point of vomiting, though she's been warned not to indulge. After a servant wipes the vomit away, she dives right back into the edibles. The tragicomic effect is not unlike the vice grip the movie holds you in; The Favourite is so delicious that you keep wanting more of it, even though you know it's about to make you sick.
The Favourite's brilliantly sustained final image, dissolving again and again and again, ends the movie on a perverse though unsurprisingly tragic note. "Bunnies, bunnies, it must be bunnies." Some scars are more visible than others; when there are too many, you're blind to all else.
The Favourite was the Opening Night Selection and will play once more on October 13th at 2:45 PM. It opens in limited release on November 23rd.
Grade: A/A-
Oscar Chances: An across the board threat in virtually every category but especially Picture, Costume Design, Director, Screenplay, and Actress or Supporting Actress. We imagine there will be much disagreement about who is "supporting" whom here but just know that in the screentime sweepstakes the hierarchy goes like so -- Stone, Colman, and Weisz -- but the movie is very triangular. Stone is the clearest "lead" in the reductive sense, though, as she has the biggest character arc journey and is also the prime catalyst for the plot.