"The Favourite" did something no other Oscar award-winning movie did this year: it completely floored me.
Despite my amazement with "The Favourite" after watching it this past December, most of the award ceremonies of 2019 disagreed with me. This film received 10 Academy Award nominations, and yet only went home with one of those.
"The Favourite" is a fever dream of socialites filled with raucous behavior that plays with the place of gender roles in society. This is a movie that is both completely different from the world we live in today and somehow extremely relevant.
It examines the relationships between Queen Anne of 18th century England and the people who serve her, even going as far as to bring in LGBTQ+ relationships between Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough and her servant, Abigail Masham. Despite seeming like a boring period piece that would make most average moviegoers want to pull their hair out, it brings a fresh modern twist with the examination of lesbian relationships in the royal court.
Because of how "The Favourite" ties in modern and radical themes to the traditional Oscar-bait of historical fiction, I believe that "The Favourite" is something we have not seen before in our film environment, making it a movie prime for awards — or so it seemed.
I loved "The Favourite" just because of how unabashedly weird it was. It was something I had never seen before in theaters. This movie is just so peculiar that it causes the audience to take a step back and laugh at every moment without taking it all too seriously. I loved how "The Favourite" caused me to laugh, cry and question the sanity of every character all at once throughout my viewing. The writing of the screenplay is absolutely astonishing and is something that I am going to continue to take inspiration from as a writer.
"The Favourite" also succeeded in writing women as people, something that is somehow still very difficult for most movies to accomplish today. The character development of the power-hungry Abigail caused each viewer to weigh who their own favorite was while the writing of Sarah’s tough love for the Queen then caused the audience to examine how they love and what love truly means. "The Favourite" caused each and every one of its audience members to question what love is: is it merely affection and flattery or is it shown through complete honesty and humility?
Yorgos Lanthimos is a complete mastermind in the creation of "The Favourite," with every scene creating a masterpiece of cinema, all accredited to the director. The fact the Lanthimos did not win best director at the Oscars this year is a crime against humanity. His work in "The Favourite" pulled me in so intensely I couldn’t look away for the entirety of the two-hour film.
And can we all just sit down and talk about the cinematography for a second? Oh my God, the cinematography is something of dreams. The final shot of the movie experiments with details of exposure, overlaying the characters' faces over one another with Queen Anne’s rabbits until the viewer cannot take it any longer. I watched this entire movie in complete awe of the cinematography and its editing. And how "The Favourite" somehow lost best editing to the nightmare that was "Bohemian Rhapsody"? I have to laugh.
