“Is there room for two queens on a single island? In a single movie? The answers, according to “Mary Queen of Scots,” are “not quite” and “almost.”
“The monarchs in question are Mary, played by Saoirse Ronan, and her cousin Elizabeth I, played by Margot Robbie. The history books cast them as bitter rivals, but the film imagines them as long-distance frenemies.
“Flashing back from the moment of Mary’s execution in 1587 to her arrival on a Scottish beach more than a quarter-century earlier, the director, Josie Rourke, and the screenwriter, Beau Willimon (“House of Cards”), conjure parallel courts in which the monarchs are sometimes pawns of entrenched male power.
“Mary, already a widow and still in her teens, alights from France as an avatar of worldliness and modernity in a rugged, clannish country.”
Read more at NY Times
