A 'Golden Age' of elaborate dresses and big wigs

A kitsch extravaganza aquiver with trembling bosoms, booming guns and wild energy, Elizabeth: The Golden Age tells, if more often shouts, the story of the bastard monarch who ruled England with an iron grip and two tightly closed legs. It's the story of a woman, played by the irresistibly watchable Cate Blanchett, who sublimated her libidinal energies through court intrigue until she found sweet relief by violently bringing the Spanish Empire to its knees.

But that's getting ahead of this story, which begins in 1585 when Queen Elizabeth hit 52, though the film seems to put her closer to 38, Blanchett's actual age. The blurring of fact and fancy is, of course, routine with this kind of opulent big-screen production, in which the finer points of history largely take a back seat to personal melodrama and lavish details of production design and costumes. In this regard The Golden Age may set a standard for such an adulterated form: it's reductive, distorted and deliriously far-fetched, but the gowns are fabulous, the wigs are a sight and Clive Owen makes a dandy Errol Flynn, even if he's really meant to be Walter Raleigh, the queen's favorite smoldering slab of man meat.

When Raleigh first swaggers into the court, he's toting a trunk of New World goodies, including some tobacco leaves that, when smoked, he promises with an insinuating smile, are very "stimulating." Hearing that Raleigh has named a swath of New World land Virginia in her honor, Elizabeth seems exceedingly eager for stimulation. She may be a virgin or virginesque, but she's far from cloistered. She surrounds herself with female pets ("My bitches wear my collars"), the loveliest of whom is Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish). Bess holds the queenly hand, caresses the royal head and keeps the imperial body intimate company, suggesting that Elizabeth abandoned the metaphoric sword but not the chalice.

The director, Shekhar Kapur, who put Blanchett through her flouncing paces in Elizabeth, the rather more restrained 1998 film about the monarch's earlier years, doesn't spend much time pondering the Sapphic possibilities, mostly because he has armies to unleash, conspiracies to uncork and one head to lop off (Samantha Morton as Mary Stuart). Even so, despite the hurried, sporadically frantic pace, there are a few nice moments in which Elizabeth uses Bess and Raleigh as erotic puppets, turning them into expressions of her own masculine and feminine selves, as if she were a child playing naughty with Barbie and Ken. In her spectral face you see a lonely soul trying to hold onto sanity, to a thread of real life.

Owen looks as if he's having a grand time, whether he's revving Elizabeth up with his tales of seafaring adventure, nuzzling a swooning supplicant or hanging off a ship's rigging as the wind gently stirs his chest hair. With his seafaring movie tan and muscular physicality, he matches up well against the forceful Blanchett, whose strange beauty adds to the queen's otherworldly effect. The Elizabeth of this film bears little relation to the flushed young woman of the first film, who had not yet been unmoored from the merely mortal. The spring lamb is no more, and with her Kabuki-white mask and palace rituals, this older, ethereal Elizabeth on occasion seems like a space alien, which, in some ways, is what she has become.