Lady Jane

For anyone interested in the history of England's Tudor dynasty, this is definitely a must-see film. The most famous of the Tudors are King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, but this film offers up a look at the intrigues within the court in the period between Henry's death and Elizabeth's accession, as Catholic Princess Mary strives to gain the throne after the death of her Protestant brother King Edward VI. The religious divisions caused by Henry VIII's embrace of the Reformation are well documented and believably portrayed.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the title role - Lady Jane Grey - cousin of the young King Edward and a fanatical Protestant who is manouvered into taking the throne after Edward's death at the age of 15. Jane - also 15 - is at first overwhelmed by the thought of being Queen, but then embraces the throne. Her immaturity, however, and wilfullness (not surprisingly for a 15 year old) get the better of her and lead to her downfall after only nine days on the throne, and Mary's accession. Carter was excellent in this role. Cary Elwes also offered up a strong performance as Guilford Dudley, whom Jane is forced to marry against her will, but whom she falls passionately in love with. The supporting cast included performances - all of them quite good - by Sara Kestelman as Jane's mother Frances, Patrick Stewart as her father Henry, John Wood as the Duke of Northumberland (Guilford's father), Warren Saire as the young King Edward, and - playing this role absolutely perfectly - Michael Hordern as Dr. Feckenham, confessor to Princess Mary. In fact, there really wasn't a sub-par performance in this movie.

It isn't perfect, mind you. It's a little bit too long, and I found myself, particularly in the last hour or so, wondering when it would end. Some of the history is questionable. Many historians think that neither Jane nor Edward were as innocent in the plot to keep Mary from the throne as the movie portrays them, and the love story between Jane and Guilford is, as I understand it, largely fictional. But the basics are quite correct, the behind the scenes plotting believably portrayed and the religious struggle of the time absolutely authentic. It's well worth watching this movie if you are interested in this period of English history.

7/10.

It's difficult to know how to take a film that begins with a history lesson (to the self-important sound of a beating drum, no less) and ends with a quote from Plato. Between the two is a narrative that wants to be both a conventional love story and an unconventional period film. It doesn't quite succeed at either, but for viewers of LADY JANE, the pleasure is in the details, and there are plenty of those.

To first dispense with the glaring historical inaccuracy that lies at the film's center, Lady Jane Grey, the Nine-Day Queen of England in 1553, did not in truth have a passionate love match in her husband, Guilford Dudley. Theirs was an arranged marriage, highly political in nature and masterminded by Dudley's ambitious father, the Duke of Northumberland. In reality, Jane resented and distrusted her husband, who was a spoiled and rather empty-headed young man with none of the high intellectual achievement so prominent in Jane.

For the second dispensation, Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Jane, is still unskilled at acting in this, her first role. She can furrow her brow with admirable dexterity to denote every emotion from confusion to embarrassment to sexual fulfillment, but there's little evidence of much going on behind, in the furrows of an actor's brain. However, since those afore-mentioned details surround her, it becomes fairly easy for a more demanding audience to overlook her callowness.

Now for the details, beginning with everyone else in the cast. Has John Wood ever utilised his supercilious half-smile to better advantage? As Northumberland, he's perfect - driven by the need to consolidate his power when Jane's cousin Edward VI falls into a fatal illness, he conceives a scheme that will require relentless control over nearly everyone at court. While his fellow ministers, all burly toughs, inevitably knuckle under to his combination of silken flattery and outright threats, he's thwarted by two seemingly weak women - Jane and Mary Tudor (played with real grit and bitterness by Jane Lapotaire). It's a tossup whether Wood is better at the threats or at two points of emotional breakdown - one, when he must cast the die and order the agonising prolongation of Edward's death to complete his plans, or when, mud-pelted and dishevelled following his defeat by Mary's army, he ends up in the Tower, where all he can offer to his sons and followers is a weary, `I'm sorry.' It's the rare film where Wood's comic instincts don't get the better of his serious performance - this is one of them.

As Jane's equally controlling parents, Patrick Stewart and Sara Kestelman are almost as good. Stewart's character, the Duke of Suffolk, isn't a bright man, but his pursuit of his ambitions never quite overrides his notion of family honor, and this keeps him sympathetic, as all the supposed villains of the film remain. That's another of the details that deserves cherishing - the refusal to go for simplistic characters. Stewart is especially good when he throws all caution to the wind and raises an army to rescue his daughter, overriding even the objections of his formidable wife.

Other details are in the costuming, the suitably squalid tavern and brothel scenes, the bit where the aristocratic Kestelman chows down on her dinner, gnawing on a greasy chop and wiping her mouth with her sleeve, and the achingly beautiful winter deer hunt that runs under the opening credits. All this and more make up for a downbeat ending and a central failure to come up with a satisfying examination of that most enigmatic of queens, Lady Jane Grey.

Although it has been more than a decade since I saw Lady Jane, I remember that it moved me greatly. The ambiance and characters are fully developed. Helen Bonham Carter was quite young, perfect for the role, and turned out to be quite a revelation. I saw the film in Madrid. I'll never forget the sight of a middle aged Spaniard (male) in the audience weeping at the conclusion. (The Spanish nobility were the "bad guys" of this drama).

It's hard for me to be objective about this film as I find both the main actors so divine, but I thought the portrayal of the developing romance extremely moving, by the time the film ended I was sobbing, and I say that about almost NO movie.

The cinematography was stunning, both indoor and outdoor shots were beautifully visualised and captured. The sets and costumes also were extremely well done.

Lady Jane Grey, the "Nine Days' Wonder", is a controversial figure in English history, one of a small group of English "monarchs" whose right to that title is accepted by some historians and denied by others. (Others include Queen Matilda, King Louis and King Philip, the husband of Jane's nemesis Queen Mary I). To some, mostly Protestants, she is Queen Jane, the rightful Queen of England for the nine days between 10th and 19th July 1553. To others, mostly Catholics, Mary was rightfully Queen from the death of her half-brother Edward VI and Jane a mere usurper.

Legally, in fact, the position was complicated. Mary, like her sister Elizabeth, had been declared a bastard by their father Henry VIII. Towards the end of his life, however, Henry had passed the Third Succession Act, which restored his daughters to the line of succession without formally legitimising them. Edward, as he lay dying, had executed a will excluding Mary and Elizabeth from the succession and naming his cousin Jane as his successor, although, because this will had not yet been ratified by Parliament at the time of his death, Mary's supporters argued that it carried less weight than Henry's Act. Jane was proclaimed Queen by the Privy Council, who then promptly abandoned her when they realised that Mary enjoyed more popular support and that attempts to prevent her accession were doomed to failure.

"Lady Jane" was the third British film about Jane's life after a silent version from the 1920s and "Tudor Rose" from 1936, neither of which I have seen. It was made in 1986, during the "Thatcher Years", to a script by the well-known left-wing playwright David Edgar, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it is essentially Tudor history rewritten to suit the Guardian-reading classes of the 1980s. It is a curious mixture of costume drama and political tract, of fact and fiction. It follows the essential outlines of Lady Jane's story but contains two major divergences from historical fact.

The first of these concerns the relationship between Jane and her husband Lord Guilford Dudley. At first Edgar paints them as they are portrayed in most history books- Jane as intellectually precocious, scholarly and devoutly religious, Guilford as a debauched young man more interested in frequenting taverns and whorehouses than in reading Plato. Both are initially reluctant to marry and have to be coerced by their parents, who see the match as politically and financially advantageous. In the film, however, Jane and Guilford quickly fall deeply in love, although the historical evidence suggests that they disliked one another intensely throughout their marriage.

Edgar's second major divergence from history is his attempt to introduce twentieth-century politics into the period. During their brief reign Jane and Guilford are so shocked by the poverty of their subjects that they introduce a reformist political agenda- distribution of land among the peasantry, state-funded relief of poverty, universal free education based upon progressive principles and the abolition of corporal punishment. At times I thought I was watching an alternate history fantasy about how England, under the enlightened rule of Queen Jane the Good, became the world's first socialist welfare state nearly four centuries before such ideas caught on in the rest of the world. In the film it is this reformist agenda, as much as any popular support for Mary, which causes Jane's Council to abandon her cause, her Councillors all being wealthy Establishment figures with much to lose from such socio-economic reforms. Also, Mary's determination to marry Philip of Spain was due more to political considerations than to romantic love, and Thomas Wyatt's rebellion did not aim to restore Jane to the throne. (By 1554 England's Protestants had turned to Elizabeth as their champion).

And yet, despite Edgar's tendentious distortion of history, this was a film which I enjoyed in many ways. The love story of Jane and Guilford, however ahistorical it might be, was touchingly handled. Helena Bonham Carter, in her second major film role, was not as good as she had been in "A Room with a View" the previous year, making Jane perhaps rather too priggish. Cary Elwes, however, is good, playing as Guilford as that familiar figure from coming-of-age dramas, the truculent, rebellious teenager who matures into a sensitive, caring young man when he finds true love. Jane Lapotaire is also good as Queen Mary, making her more sympathetic than one would expect given her popular reputation as the tyrannical "Bloody Mary". It is a far more subtle portrayal of the Queen than Kathy Burke's demented fishwife in "Elizabeth". Other good performances come from Patrick Stewart and Sara Kestelman as Jane's overbearing parents, John Wood as her devious, scheming father-in-law the Duke of Northumberland, Warren Saire as the tormented King Edward and Michael Hordern as Doctor Feckenham, the elderly Catholic theologian who vainly tries to convert Jane to his faith. (Despite Edgar's modernising agenda, he does not try to hide the religious controversies of the period, with Jane's fervent Protestantism and Mary's equally fervent Catholicism much to the fore).

The film was directed by Trevor Nunn, best-known as a stage and television director. It is one of only three feature films he has made, the others being adaptations of Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" and Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night". Yet on the basis of this film and "Twelfth Night" (I have never seen "Hedda") it seems a pity that he has not worked more in the cinema. Here he handles his material well, the story moves fluently and there are a number of memorable scenes. I was particularly struck by the one where Jane and Guilford announce their wishes for the country, with each wish smashing a wine-glass with the exclamation "Then it is done!" Even though it might tell us more about the 1980s than the 1550s, "Lady Jane" is still a very watchable historical romance-drama. 7/10