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Firebrand (Film Review)
Firebrand was available on a streaming service I have, so I could watch the movie I missed in the theatres, the first one focused on Katherine Parr. (Despite the gazillion of Tudor media products out there already.) Overall: two thirds of the movie are very good. The rest felt to me like it was veering into counterfactiual melodrama in a way that's condescending to the audience (i.e. I couldn't help but suspect the changes were because the film creative team - said deviation isn't in the novel the movie is based on - didn't trust its audience to understand how dangerous and high stakes the real situation was), but your mileage may differ. In any case: the performances were fantastic, both Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr and Jude Law as Henry VIII., and the costumes were gorgeous and actually period accurate, for both women and men. No women running around in modern hair styles and vaguely late 19th century dresses, and the guys actually have all those unbecoming-to-the-modern-eye lengthy beards. Extra point for the use of period music, especially Henry's "Pasttime in good Company", in a way that's highly characterisation- and plot relevant.
First of all, I really mean it about the performances. I think Alicia Vikander has the harder job, because she's essentially playing two roles - Katherine as she needs to appear to Henry, calm, completely devoted to him, and Katherine for the audience, i.e. what's really going on with her, in rising fear for her life, horrified by what happens to Anne Askew - and the former needed to be convincing, too, because Henry is a paranoid tyrant but not stupid. She is also good in conveying Catherine's fierce intellligence and intense religious devotion. The later was also welcome, because a) it's really one of historical Katherine Parr's key motivations, and b) it's where a lot of historical fiction these days chickens out. (I.e. sympathetic characters and religion. The antagonists can be fanatics and/or superstitious, but the heroes and heroines come with 21st century attitudes. (Not just true for the Philippa Gregorys of this world - I'll never get over Katherinen of Aragon, supportive of Muslim and Jewish faith - , but also Hilary Mantel, who gives us Thomas Cromwell, Renaissance Superman, who at best in one half sentence thinks he likes the "Doctors of Geneva" (i.e. Calvin and Zwingli) more than "Brother Martin", but of course does not display any Calvinist convictions whatsoever.) (Very laudable exception: C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series. Yes, our fictional hero himself goes from zealous reformer to diillusioned "I'm not sure there is a God, but I will try to live an ehtical life regardless" humanist, but there are several sympathetic important regular characters who are very religious and stay that way, as fits the times, from Guy (Catholic) to Katherine Parr (Protestant).) The woman displayed in Firebrand is one I can see writing a book like Lamentation of a Sinner as Katherine Parr did. Purely from an acting pov, she even sold me on the climactic scene near the end, though script wise, this really is part of the condescending-to-your-audience part of the last part of the movie I was complaining about earlier and will go into more detail about later.
Jude Law as old Henry: hands down the best old Henry I've ever seen. Sells the frightening unpredictability, the paranoia, but also the flickers of Henry's "hail fellow, well met!" Bluff King Hal persona that made him popular for a long time. The scene where Henry plays his old self composed song "Past time in good Company" is a magnificent case of Henry charactersation covering all the angles. His love for music is sincere, the song is even likeable - but the fact all the courtiers join in and cheer comes with the big stink of fear because there is no other choice than to applaud and be enthusiastic about everything the King does and better know every word of the damn song. One thing the movie does really well overall is showing that Katherine and for that matter most of the other courtiers live next to a ticking time bomb and need to be on and mentally alert all the time because this man can do whatever he wants with them. And because Katherine has an agenda other than her own survival, i.e. the victory of the Reformist, not the Traditionalist faction in the new Anglican church, she faces an increasingly larger danger. All the Henry scenes reminded me of Death of Stalin. (And hey, Simon Russell Beale as Bishop Gardiner isn't evil the way he's as Berija, but his role in the plot is not entirely dissimilar.) Also, very important: Jude Law's Henry is believable as a man who is constantly in great physical pain. (Which doesn't excuse his deeds, but it certainly factors into them.)
Supporting cast: Beale I already mentioned (and he's the one who gets to do the most), then there are both Seymour brothers, Edward and Thomas (looking like their portraits for a change), who initially are Katherine's allies in Protestantism (well, Edward is, Thomas is - err, Thomas) but eventually to save their own necks are ready to throw her to the wolves (this is one of the movies' fictional plot twists I didn't have a problem with, because while it didn't happen in real life due to the situation in question not arising, I certainly could have believed it from either of them if their own lives, limbs and plalin old ambition had been at stake, and that's leaving aside Thomas would later betray Katherine in a different way), and all three royal children, with young Elizabeth being in fact our narrator. The movie emphasizes Edward and Elizabeth love Katherine as a mother, but for my money the most interesting scene involving the kids is one between Elizabeth and Mary (who is of course an adult woman, not a child or teen) where Mary advises Elizabeth to keep her head down (this is at a point where it's already pretty obvious Katherine might not be Queen for much longer) and not make a stand to their father the way she, Mary, had done for her mother, because otherwise he'll send her from castle to castle in exile and never let her see the Queen again anyway, and while she's giving this very serious advice, she keeps bursting out in uncontrollable giggles. (At first Elizabeth is confused and asks "why are you laughing", and then she listens. I tihnk it's obvious to her as well as to the audience that what Henry did to Mary back in the day had well and truly broken her, and it comes back here again right now.)
(Mary otherwise is mostly a quiet background presence, but clearly desparate for her father's affection, and not hostile to either Elizabeth or Katherine Parr, which I appreciated. One of the reasons why I stayed the hell away from My Lady Jane is that I osmosed they have a cacklingly evil insane Mary Tudor as a villainous. Sorry, but after the last 15 years provided us with interesting, layered and tragic Marys - notably one of the better aspects in The Tudors, but also in Becoming Elizabeth, in Doctor Who's audio plays and in several novels - , I'm not in the market for Evil McEvil Marys anymore.)
Sir not Appearing in This Tudor Fiction: Thomas Cramner. Very notably so, since he was a) Archbishop of Canterbury, b) head of the reformist faction among the English clergy, and thus under attack from the traditionalists like Gardiner as well, and c) a Katherine Parr partisan. I very much suspect his absense is so the film doesn't have explain why Cramner outranks Gardiner but Gardiner behaves like he's the highest cleric in the land, and also because the movie does play with gender lines - all the women (and girls) remain loyal to Katherine, all the men were either against her to begin with or desert her to save themselves like the Seymours. Oh, and also, in rl, Thomas Cramner was present when Henry died. This... would not have fitted in how this movie ends.
And now to the nitpicks. Which aren't about all the various fictional twists, don't worry, just some of them. Some made sense given the circumstances. For example: the entire movie was filmed on location in a castle/mansion in the Lake Country, which clearly was way cheaper than filming in Hampton Court (or rebuilding Hampton Court) would have been, and the in-universe explanation as to why the court is there in the countryside is that there's been an outbreak of the plague again, which, you know, happened in irregular intervals in that century. I was all for that and just grateful they didn't do as Kepur did in Elizabeth, i.e. substitute a lot of Gothic churches for Tudor palaces. So no problem there. I was also on board with the first big addition, making Anne Askew, the female Protestant preacher, not just someone who probably had some connections to ladies in Katherine's court but likely never saw the Queen in her life into an old friend of Katherine's who even knew her from before her first marriage. (I think Anne Askew was ten years younger than Katherine Parr, so it wouldn't have been impossible, but not likely the "young best friends" type of relationship hinted at here.) I could immediately see why they did that - it made the fate of Anne at once much more personal not just for Katherine but the audience, and it provided Katherine with a dramatically interesting "what if?" foil, i.e. Anne Askew, who left husband and family behind to become a preacher (and ended up burned for it) is who Katherine might have ended up becoming if she'd devoted herself wholesale to her religious convictions instead of also listening to her survival sense and wordlly wishes.
But: from the moment Henry gives his okay to Gardiner to investigate the Queen, the movie stops shaking hands with reality and instead waves it goodbye. What actually happened was: Henry went as far as signing an arrest warrant for Katherine. Katherine found out about it in time and managed to reach Henry, grovel sufficiently for his ego of how he of course knew better and she was just a stupid little woman grateful for his corrections etc., and Henry forgave her - but did not cancel the warrant. Instead, he was with her when the guards and Gardiner showed up, and cursed them on a "How dare you?" note. Exit guards and Gardiner, intimidated. Thus, Henry illustrated once more the Tudor monarch talent of playing out different court factions against each other - he'd scared his wife and the Traditionalists into obedience, from his pov. Mind you, it could easily have gone a different way - who knows, if Katherine had not reached him and humiliated herself sufficiently for his taste, he might have gone through with it. (Rumor has it he way eying her friend, Catherine Willoughby, the Duchess of Suffolk and widow his lately departed bff Charles Brandon at the time.) It really was a very dangerous situation for her. But by keeping her cool, judging what Henry wanted from her correctly, Katherine escaped this trap and remained alive and a Queen till Henry died.
What happens in the movie: Gardiner actually has Katherine arrested. She and two of her ladies (including the only there named by with her full name Duchess of Suffolk) end up in the local dungeon. In their nightshifts. Freezing. (This already made me groan. Henry's reign gives us enough precedents on what happened when a Queen or a high born lady was arrested. No, they weren't locked in the dungeon. Catherine Howard, for example, was basically quaranteened in her apartments until the prelminary investigations were over and she was transfered to the Tower. Where she also wasn't in a bare prison cell - nor had Anne Boleyn been - but in the royal apartments. So if Katherine Parr had been arrested , it likely would have happened the same way. I.e. she'd have told not to leave her apartments and additional guards would have been posted in front of them. And certainly she would have continued to wear her usual outfits, and would have been fed and clothed as a Queen till her dying day.) Then we get the series of scenes where Gardiner tries to find witnesses connecting Katherine to Anne Askew and to prove she's a heretic in Henry's sense of the word, and the Seymours eventually decide to sell her out. Meanwhile, Henry's health deteriotes further. Then Catherine is made ready for what she thinks will be her execution by fire. She even walks past a pyre made ready for that. But no, in the last minute, she's brought to Henry instead. (Again, not very likely. A public burning takes very long, and executing a Queen this way - I just don't see it. Methinks Henry would have commuted her sentence to behading. Again, if things had ever gone that far, which they didn't. If they had done, though, there's no way Katherine wouldn't have had a clergyman or priest at her side all through the night.) Henry (clearly dying) orders everyone out because he wants to talk to Katherine alone. (When the real Henry was dying, Katherine was in fact not even in the same palace with him and kept from his side, because various courtiers, including the Seymours, were already jockeying for position in next regiime. What the dying Henry certainly wasn't, at any point, was alone. Again, there would have been clergy present (including Cramner, who held the dying Henry's hand), doctors (lots) and courtiers. He might have ordered some of them out, but never all clergy. Henry might have thought he was God's representative on Earth, but he also was convinced he needed a priest at his side to die a relgious death. The real reason why Katherine and Henry need to be alone in this scene, though, is that after he asks her whether she loves him, and she replies "I loved my King", and he says "that's not what I asked", the Katherine of this movie makes the decision to NOT go through another rigmarole of grovelling and fearing for her life. Instead, she tells him "I think we're both bound for hell, you and I. Are you ready?" and kills him. (Physically, it's not implausible the way she does it - he's already dying, not able to move much in his state.) Now I bet she (and Henry's other wives) must have dreamt of this at some point, and there's of course karmic justice in the idea, plus it wraps up movie!Katherine's arc from the start where she thinks she can change Henry's mind and further the cause with soft power and Anne Askew tells her no, not with a King like that, true change only comes if you're willing to get your hands dirty and risk everything to this point. But it would have been so utterly impossible in rl that it's - well, right at the side of good old Schiller letting Jeanne d'Arc die on the battlefield instead of the stake, I guess. It's wish fulfillment of the highest order because the creators of that scene deemed reality insufficient.
Speaking of reality: we then get a concluding monologue from Elizabeth of how Katherine's next book was published, starting the age of a kind, tolerant and not-persecutiing religion and how Katherine was a pioneer to that age, and the credits informing us Elizabeth became Queen and reigned for 45 years and her reign wasn't defined by either men or war.
Catholics persecuted in the reign of Edward VI, i.e. the one immediately following Henry's death when the relgious pendulum swung to the other side: Excuse you?
Catholics persecuted in Elizabeth's own reign: Say what?
Ra-rah-Rah-War-With-Spain crowd from Francis Drake to the Earl of Essex: What even?
Self: Guys, I can understand why you wanted to end on a happy note and not mention how Katherine's next marriage and her life ended, especially since the Elizabeth part of it was among its most heartbreaking aspects. But couldn't you have ended by letting her say that Katherine, the first English Queen to write and publish books, showed her what women can do or something like that instead of trying to sell me on Katherine Parr as a kind of promoter of the Enlightenment several centuries too early? (I rather suspect Katherine Parr would have been appalled by the Enlightenment. Certainly she would not have prmomoted "Toleration" in the sense of regarding any religion but the nascent evangelical-Protestant one as one worth following. As you yourself showed, she took her faith really seriously.)
Hence my conclusion from above: two thirds of this movie are great. The rest is pandering to the audience and believing that a) we wouldn't get how dangerous Katherine's positiion with Henry was if she wasn't literally rescued from the stake, b) we wouldn't regard her survival as an achievmenent if she didn't do the old bastard in by her own hands, and c) we would not have regarded her being religious as sympathetic if we wouldn't have been reassured that her type of religiousness was a post Enlightenment one.
First of all, I really mean it about the performances. I think Alicia Vikander has the harder job, because she's essentially playing two roles - Katherine as she needs to appear to Henry, calm, completely devoted to him, and Katherine for the audience, i.e. what's really going on with her, in rising fear for her life, horrified by what happens to Anne Askew - and the former needed to be convincing, too, because Henry is a paranoid tyrant but not stupid. She is also good in conveying Catherine's fierce intellligence and intense religious devotion. The later was also welcome, because a) it's really one of historical Katherine Parr's key motivations, and b) it's where a lot of historical fiction these days chickens out. (I.e. sympathetic characters and religion. The antagonists can be fanatics and/or superstitious, but the heroes and heroines come with 21st century attitudes. (Not just true for the Philippa Gregorys of this world - I'll never get over Katherinen of Aragon, supportive of Muslim and Jewish faith - , but also Hilary Mantel, who gives us Thomas Cromwell, Renaissance Superman, who at best in one half sentence thinks he likes the "Doctors of Geneva" (i.e. Calvin and Zwingli) more than "Brother Martin", but of course does not display any Calvinist convictions whatsoever.) (Very laudable exception: C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series. Yes, our fictional hero himself goes from zealous reformer to diillusioned "I'm not sure there is a God, but I will try to live an ehtical life regardless" humanist, but there are several sympathetic important regular characters who are very religious and stay that way, as fits the times, from Guy (Catholic) to Katherine Parr (Protestant).) The woman displayed in Firebrand is one I can see writing a book like Lamentation of a Sinner as Katherine Parr did. Purely from an acting pov, she even sold me on the climactic scene near the end, though script wise, this really is part of the condescending-to-your-audience part of the last part of the movie I was complaining about earlier and will go into more detail about later.
Jude Law as old Henry: hands down the best old Henry I've ever seen. Sells the frightening unpredictability, the paranoia, but also the flickers of Henry's "hail fellow, well met!" Bluff King Hal persona that made him popular for a long time. The scene where Henry plays his old self composed song "Past time in good Company" is a magnificent case of Henry charactersation covering all the angles. His love for music is sincere, the song is even likeable - but the fact all the courtiers join in and cheer comes with the big stink of fear because there is no other choice than to applaud and be enthusiastic about everything the King does and better know every word of the damn song. One thing the movie does really well overall is showing that Katherine and for that matter most of the other courtiers live next to a ticking time bomb and need to be on and mentally alert all the time because this man can do whatever he wants with them. And because Katherine has an agenda other than her own survival, i.e. the victory of the Reformist, not the Traditionalist faction in the new Anglican church, she faces an increasingly larger danger. All the Henry scenes reminded me of Death of Stalin. (And hey, Simon Russell Beale as Bishop Gardiner isn't evil the way he's as Berija, but his role in the plot is not entirely dissimilar.) Also, very important: Jude Law's Henry is believable as a man who is constantly in great physical pain. (Which doesn't excuse his deeds, but it certainly factors into them.)
Supporting cast: Beale I already mentioned (and he's the one who gets to do the most), then there are both Seymour brothers, Edward and Thomas (looking like their portraits for a change), who initially are Katherine's allies in Protestantism (well, Edward is, Thomas is - err, Thomas) but eventually to save their own necks are ready to throw her to the wolves (this is one of the movies' fictional plot twists I didn't have a problem with, because while it didn't happen in real life due to the situation in question not arising, I certainly could have believed it from either of them if their own lives, limbs and plalin old ambition had been at stake, and that's leaving aside Thomas would later betray Katherine in a different way), and all three royal children, with young Elizabeth being in fact our narrator. The movie emphasizes Edward and Elizabeth love Katherine as a mother, but for my money the most interesting scene involving the kids is one between Elizabeth and Mary (who is of course an adult woman, not a child or teen) where Mary advises Elizabeth to keep her head down (this is at a point where it's already pretty obvious Katherine might not be Queen for much longer) and not make a stand to their father the way she, Mary, had done for her mother, because otherwise he'll send her from castle to castle in exile and never let her see the Queen again anyway, and while she's giving this very serious advice, she keeps bursting out in uncontrollable giggles. (At first Elizabeth is confused and asks "why are you laughing", and then she listens. I tihnk it's obvious to her as well as to the audience that what Henry did to Mary back in the day had well and truly broken her, and it comes back here again right now.)
(Mary otherwise is mostly a quiet background presence, but clearly desparate for her father's affection, and not hostile to either Elizabeth or Katherine Parr, which I appreciated. One of the reasons why I stayed the hell away from My Lady Jane is that I osmosed they have a cacklingly evil insane Mary Tudor as a villainous. Sorry, but after the last 15 years provided us with interesting, layered and tragic Marys - notably one of the better aspects in The Tudors, but also in Becoming Elizabeth, in Doctor Who's audio plays and in several novels - , I'm not in the market for Evil McEvil Marys anymore.)
Sir not Appearing in This Tudor Fiction: Thomas Cramner. Very notably so, since he was a) Archbishop of Canterbury, b) head of the reformist faction among the English clergy, and thus under attack from the traditionalists like Gardiner as well, and c) a Katherine Parr partisan. I very much suspect his absense is so the film doesn't have explain why Cramner outranks Gardiner but Gardiner behaves like he's the highest cleric in the land, and also because the movie does play with gender lines - all the women (and girls) remain loyal to Katherine, all the men were either against her to begin with or desert her to save themselves like the Seymours. Oh, and also, in rl, Thomas Cramner was present when Henry died. This... would not have fitted in how this movie ends.
And now to the nitpicks. Which aren't about all the various fictional twists, don't worry, just some of them. Some made sense given the circumstances. For example: the entire movie was filmed on location in a castle/mansion in the Lake Country, which clearly was way cheaper than filming in Hampton Court (or rebuilding Hampton Court) would have been, and the in-universe explanation as to why the court is there in the countryside is that there's been an outbreak of the plague again, which, you know, happened in irregular intervals in that century. I was all for that and just grateful they didn't do as Kepur did in Elizabeth, i.e. substitute a lot of Gothic churches for Tudor palaces. So no problem there. I was also on board with the first big addition, making Anne Askew, the female Protestant preacher, not just someone who probably had some connections to ladies in Katherine's court but likely never saw the Queen in her life into an old friend of Katherine's who even knew her from before her first marriage. (I think Anne Askew was ten years younger than Katherine Parr, so it wouldn't have been impossible, but not likely the "young best friends" type of relationship hinted at here.) I could immediately see why they did that - it made the fate of Anne at once much more personal not just for Katherine but the audience, and it provided Katherine with a dramatically interesting "what if?" foil, i.e. Anne Askew, who left husband and family behind to become a preacher (and ended up burned for it) is who Katherine might have ended up becoming if she'd devoted herself wholesale to her religious convictions instead of also listening to her survival sense and wordlly wishes.
But: from the moment Henry gives his okay to Gardiner to investigate the Queen, the movie stops shaking hands with reality and instead waves it goodbye. What actually happened was: Henry went as far as signing an arrest warrant for Katherine. Katherine found out about it in time and managed to reach Henry, grovel sufficiently for his ego of how he of course knew better and she was just a stupid little woman grateful for his corrections etc., and Henry forgave her - but did not cancel the warrant. Instead, he was with her when the guards and Gardiner showed up, and cursed them on a "How dare you?" note. Exit guards and Gardiner, intimidated. Thus, Henry illustrated once more the Tudor monarch talent of playing out different court factions against each other - he'd scared his wife and the Traditionalists into obedience, from his pov. Mind you, it could easily have gone a different way - who knows, if Katherine had not reached him and humiliated herself sufficiently for his taste, he might have gone through with it. (Rumor has it he way eying her friend, Catherine Willoughby, the Duchess of Suffolk and widow his lately departed bff Charles Brandon at the time.) It really was a very dangerous situation for her. But by keeping her cool, judging what Henry wanted from her correctly, Katherine escaped this trap and remained alive and a Queen till Henry died.
What happens in the movie: Gardiner actually has Katherine arrested. She and two of her ladies (including the only there named by with her full name Duchess of Suffolk) end up in the local dungeon. In their nightshifts. Freezing. (This already made me groan. Henry's reign gives us enough precedents on what happened when a Queen or a high born lady was arrested. No, they weren't locked in the dungeon. Catherine Howard, for example, was basically quaranteened in her apartments until the prelminary investigations were over and she was transfered to the Tower. Where she also wasn't in a bare prison cell - nor had Anne Boleyn been - but in the royal apartments. So if Katherine Parr had been arrested , it likely would have happened the same way. I.e. she'd have told not to leave her apartments and additional guards would have been posted in front of them. And certainly she would have continued to wear her usual outfits, and would have been fed and clothed as a Queen till her dying day.) Then we get the series of scenes where Gardiner tries to find witnesses connecting Katherine to Anne Askew and to prove she's a heretic in Henry's sense of the word, and the Seymours eventually decide to sell her out. Meanwhile, Henry's health deteriotes further. Then Catherine is made ready for what she thinks will be her execution by fire. She even walks past a pyre made ready for that. But no, in the last minute, she's brought to Henry instead. (Again, not very likely. A public burning takes very long, and executing a Queen this way - I just don't see it. Methinks Henry would have commuted her sentence to behading. Again, if things had ever gone that far, which they didn't. If they had done, though, there's no way Katherine wouldn't have had a clergyman or priest at her side all through the night.) Henry (clearly dying) orders everyone out because he wants to talk to Katherine alone. (When the real Henry was dying, Katherine was in fact not even in the same palace with him and kept from his side, because various courtiers, including the Seymours, were already jockeying for position in next regiime. What the dying Henry certainly wasn't, at any point, was alone. Again, there would have been clergy present (including Cramner, who held the dying Henry's hand), doctors (lots) and courtiers. He might have ordered some of them out, but never all clergy. Henry might have thought he was God's representative on Earth, but he also was convinced he needed a priest at his side to die a relgious death. The real reason why Katherine and Henry need to be alone in this scene, though, is that after he asks her whether she loves him, and she replies "I loved my King", and he says "that's not what I asked", the Katherine of this movie makes the decision to NOT go through another rigmarole of grovelling and fearing for her life. Instead, she tells him "I think we're both bound for hell, you and I. Are you ready?" and kills him. (Physically, it's not implausible the way she does it - he's already dying, not able to move much in his state.) Now I bet she (and Henry's other wives) must have dreamt of this at some point, and there's of course karmic justice in the idea, plus it wraps up movie!Katherine's arc from the start where she thinks she can change Henry's mind and further the cause with soft power and Anne Askew tells her no, not with a King like that, true change only comes if you're willing to get your hands dirty and risk everything to this point. But it would have been so utterly impossible in rl that it's - well, right at the side of good old Schiller letting Jeanne d'Arc die on the battlefield instead of the stake, I guess. It's wish fulfillment of the highest order because the creators of that scene deemed reality insufficient.
Speaking of reality: we then get a concluding monologue from Elizabeth of how Katherine's next book was published, starting the age of a kind, tolerant and not-persecutiing religion and how Katherine was a pioneer to that age, and the credits informing us Elizabeth became Queen and reigned for 45 years and her reign wasn't defined by either men or war.
Catholics persecuted in the reign of Edward VI, i.e. the one immediately following Henry's death when the relgious pendulum swung to the other side: Excuse you?
Catholics persecuted in Elizabeth's own reign: Say what?
Ra-rah-Rah-War-With-Spain crowd from Francis Drake to the Earl of Essex: What even?
Self: Guys, I can understand why you wanted to end on a happy note and not mention how Katherine's next marriage and her life ended, especially since the Elizabeth part of it was among its most heartbreaking aspects. But couldn't you have ended by letting her say that Katherine, the first English Queen to write and publish books, showed her what women can do or something like that instead of trying to sell me on Katherine Parr as a kind of promoter of the Enlightenment several centuries too early? (I rather suspect Katherine Parr would have been appalled by the Enlightenment. Certainly she would not have prmomoted "Toleration" in the sense of regarding any religion but the nascent evangelical-Protestant one as one worth following. As you yourself showed, she took her faith really seriously.)
Hence my conclusion from above: two thirds of this movie are great. The rest is pandering to the audience and believing that a) we wouldn't get how dangerous Katherine's positiion with Henry was if she wasn't literally rescued from the stake, b) we wouldn't regard her survival as an achievmenent if she didn't do the old bastard in by her own hands, and c) we would not have regarded her being religious as sympathetic if we wouldn't have been reassured that her type of religiousness was a post Enlightenment one.
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