NYT calls new Elizabeth movie kitschy

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, who, as played by the irresistibly watchable Cate Blanchett as David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust period, 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, Ms. 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.