Loss and Madness in the Favourite

By Kira Garcia

The Favourite takes full advantage of its Baroque setting, relishing the era’s excesses of gilt edges, powdered wigs and bad rouge. And it’s indulgent with its psychological trimmings, too: manipulation and mean-spirited comedy drive the luxuriously gynocentric plot forward. With so much sexy conniving, it’s no surprise that a deeper, subtler emotional vein goes untapped: the disassembly of Queen Anne’s psyche under the grueling failure of her fertility. The Favourite reminds us that pregnancy is a gamble, and at the end of the night, women pay their debts alone.

Period films bend history at will, but this one gets a few things precisely right: Queen Anne of England, who ruled England from 1702 until her death in 1714, was raised in a world of wealth and privilege. Her life was punctuated by political twists and defined by private tragedy. Between 1683 and 1700, she endured as many as seventeen pregnancies, each followed by miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death. Her only surviving child died just months after her final pregnancy ended, cruelly closing the loop.

Colman plays out the aftermath of these horrors as a woman in shreds. She is a middle-aged child, manipulating and manipulated, petting rabbits named after each of her dead children, stuffing herself with cake til she vomits, then going right back for more. Her…