Yet my mind keeps returning to the fact that at heart this is a metaphysical film -- we watch Elizabeth transform herself into a myth before our eyes. In the beginning she is an absolute monarch starved for human contact. In the middle she is a woman who must choose whether to make the ultimate sacrifice (as she says to herself, she has given her life for England, now must she give her soul?) By the end, she consciously turns herself into an icon, a figure of light drained of all humanity and yet exalted beyond the mortal world (the film's last line is "I am England. I am myself.")

Nothing could be harder to accomplish than a metaphysical transformation in a Hollywood movie, but "Elizabeth" has two huge assets. The first is Cate Blanchett. Saddled with a less than ideal script, she breaks free of words and tells us the whole story through her face and body -- it's like watching Joan of Arc if she had lived to become a queen but was still pulled between God and the flesh. In the grandiose battle scenes against the Spanish Armada, the visuals even refer to Joan by showing Blanchett in silver armor on a white steed urging her people on. She is fully aware that she must turn into the soul of England if victory is to be attained.

The second major asset that this film has is more rare even than great acting, and that is its visual language. Critics have mistaken the gorgeous costumes and sumptuous settings for "Masterpiece Theater" writ large. In fact what the director, Shekar Kapur, is attempting is metaphysical once again. We aren't looking at the mundane world but a densely compressed poetic world, like Shakespeare's, played out through ritual, color, and symbolism. In the unforgettable scene where the traitorous Mary, Queen of Scots, is beheaded, she throws off her black cloak to reveal a shocking blood-red dress, which becomes the blood she is about to shed. Red also signifies Christian martyrdom (Mary sees herself as Christ's direct representative, as do all the Catholics aligned with Spain, mortal enemy of England). In Chinese art the sacred colors are black, white, and red, and Kapur has seized on the same vocabulary to draw us deep into the primal elements of earth, air, and fire, as well as the primal conditions of earthly life (red), death (black) and transcendence (white). Between them, Blanchett and the visual world surrounding her create irresistible magnetism.

Yet one comes away a bit heartbroken by the glorious apotheosis that the film wants us to believe in. At another level this is a cautionary tale about the price of ultimate power. Kapur's first film about Elizabeth focused on the fall of innocence. We watched the young princess thread her way through a maze of personal dangers and state treachery. By the end, she had become a master of power, but the price she had to pay was enormous: the queen threatened to turn into the very monsters she had overcome.

In the sequel these disturbing implications come true. We stare at the monster head on, and the sight is terrible and grand at the same time. The girl who feared that power-hungry males would devour her has all but lost touch with common humanity. Her ability to love was lost somewhere in the maze. She has become the state, she is power itself, rallying the nation to fight the Armada, toying with the lives of courtiers and lovers, dreaming of immortality even as physical mortality mocks her. These are Shakespearean themes, and one cannot watch the new "Elizabeth" without thinking of Lear, Henry IV, and even Prospero -- characters caught in the suffocating space between mortal limitations and vaunting ambition.

Translated into our own day, we are talking about executive privilege and national security, along with the lesser themes of party loyalty and conniving schemers. I'm not attempting to equate Karl Rove with Francis Walsingham (played magnificently in both films by Geoffrey Rush), even though both were ruthless power brokers who took care of dirty business so that the monarch could have clean hands. Ultimately, this "Elizabeth" is about the psychopathology of absolute power and the corrosive price exacted from those who lust after it.

On its own, Blanchett's portrayal is so stirring in its gaudy rhetoric, titanic anger, and unquenchable determination that it makes the viewer yearn for such a hero, a monarch who can dictate to history how great events will turn out. In mythic terms, such a ruler is divine, or at least divinely blessed. But in our world this amounts to a pernicious fantasy. The heartbreaking part is that unlike flickering images on the screen, we can't escape into myth. Those who led us into war won't reach apotheosis in a blaze of white light. The purpose of art is to make us yearn for transcendence and to spur us on to find it in the real world. For me, "Elizabeth" did just that.

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