Mary & George Review: More Concerned with Playing the Cards Of Charm And Seduction At The Royal Court
Cast: Julianne Moore, Nicholas Galitzine, Tony Curran, Trine Dyrholm
Created By: DC Moore
Where to Watch: Sky Italia and Starz
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
Mary & George will drive crazy lovers of storytelling connected to the English monarchy, its history of conspiracies, lovers, betrayals, and families like nests of vipers ready to bite. Taken from the book “The King’s Assassin” by Benjamin Woolley, this miniseries created by DC Moore and available on Sky is an incomparable historical fresco that relies on Julianne Moore capable of guiding us into the reign of James I, whose court was a universe as refined as it is dangerous. A series of very high quality both from a visual point of view and naturally as regards the narrative. It is always said that children are pieces of the heart. But for some, especially in the distant past, they were mainly instruments of profit. We have known George (Nicholas Galitzine, Purple Hearts) since his mother Mary (Julianne Moore) gave birth to him. In the beginning, it was a (fiction) storybook by Benjamin Woolley with the fascinating title The King’s Assassin.
Then the screenwriter and showrunner DC Moore turned it into a television miniseries produced by Sky Studios which will debut on the Sky Italia satellite channels and in contemporary on Sky Italia with the first episodes starting Sunday 7 April. In the cast, the Oscar winner Julianne Moore and the young British actor on the rise Nicholas Galitzine, give the costume product for the small screen charisma and still interest even for the spectator less accustomed to historical dramas. In our review of Mary & George, we will tell you how the miniseries created by DC Moore managed to balance truthfulness and historical documentation without however drowning in it, rather giving the seven episodes of which it is composed a lively charge of embellishment of its own artistic and novelistic freedom of Benjamin Woolley’s compelling book, light years away from pure and hard historiography and yet decidedly more intriguing than a dusty study volume.
Mary & George Review: The Story Plot
England, 1592. Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) is one of the most unscrupulous nobles of a Kingdom that follows the whims and vices of King James I (Tony Curran), openly bisexual and long linked to the unscrupulous Duke of Somerset (Laurie Davidson). But Mary dreams of being able to oust him and make room for her second son, George (Nicholas Galitzine), and this shapes their family’s fortune. George has been sent to France to perfect his skills as a courtier and soon attracts the attention of the King, also because Somerset has several enemies at Court, including Queen Anne (Trine Dyrholm) and those who, through a new lover, hope to influence the politics of the kingdom. Mary & George guides us from the beginning into a reality that she reconstructs with incredible detail particular habits, customs, language, clothes, rooms, and everything that goes with it. But amidst luxury, dance, music, blood, intrigue, and manipulation emerge.
We all love harkening back to England’s past. No other monarchy can boast such a full-bodied and intriguing arsenal of characters, events, and plots and Mary & George represents just the umpteenth chapter of this narrative which for decades, on the small and big screen, has delighted us with The Crown, the two Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love, The Queen, Becoming Elizabeth, The White Queen, The Tudors and so much more. This miniseries, created by DC Moore and directed by Oliver Hermanus, Alex Winckler, and Florian Cossen, continues his legacy powerfully and fascinatingly, drawing inspiration from the historical essay “The King’s Assassin” by Benjamin Woolley. It does so above all by relying on her, Julianne Moore, author of a high-level performance.
Mary & George have a workforce that is nothing short of sumptuous. It shuns the plastic modernity of other similar operations, the pure and simple glamour, as well as an excessive current rereading of that world and its rules. Oliver Coates’ music is just one of the different elements that allow the ensemble to rise and connect with the desire to analyze with a detached but participatory gaze, the epic of one of the many families who sought fortune and power through marriages of convenience, seductions, planning, and ruthlessness. It makes a clean sweep of the multiple romantic readings we have given of the Game of Thrones concerning Anne Boleyn, Mary Stuart, and company. There are no feelings, only desires, there are no loves, only allies of convenience and necessity.
Mary & George Review and Analysis
Mary & George reminds us that Julianne Moore, as bad as she can be, no one else. Mary Villers is one of the aptest and most interesting female characters we’ve had on the small screen and in costume drama for years, I dare say. In her, more than anyone else, the miniseries claims its own identity and purpose, far from a moralizing or feminist tour court gaze, but rather close to a desire to vivisect an environment where a Machiavellian vision is terrifying, to say the least. Mary dominates her life as she dominates every man who is part of it, from the various husbands from whom she took her fortune and connections, to her children who are a bunch of idiots and vicious people, apart from him obviously, George. That boy has more vanity and ambition than talent, but he is also in the right place at the right time, he has more luck than means, and he will make history of England in his small way.
Nicholas Galitzine is handsome, smart, and still partially in love with abstract ideas such as love, honor, and desire that do not fit well with the ruthless environment in which his mother moves him, in which the truth is a double-edged sword, in which sexuality is something dangerous for oneself and others, but also the key to having power and prestigious positions in the court. Mary & George, however, manages to give us a perfect idea of how fragile and ephemeral each conquest was, in those rooms that are surrounded by a deliberately omnipresent twilight that sways in the sumptuous and wonderful interiors. More than just the small screen, the whole holds up to comparison with the best international productions for the big screen, giving a feeling of realism and truth which, to a more attentive eye, does not belong so deeply to the miniseries, which allows itself such obvious liberties how well hidden.
This can be seen in the dialogues, often too modern, in fact, in the aggressive characterization of the female characters, Moore in the lead. But there is so much energy, coherent ferocity, and beauty in this story that one decides to ignore it. Cynical at absolute levels, it is also a story of a sick relationship between mother and son, which winks not only at the Bard but also at the Greek myth, which feeds on temporal changes with flashbacks and flashforwards, with which to give us a glimpse of ‘together over an era. Mary & George is perhaps the best historical miniseries on that period of the last ten years, it is for how it avoids sugarcoating the pill, for how it reminds us how strange and insipid today’s moralistic rereadings are out of place, for how much we have often had an idea distant from the truth about those who intrigued, triumphed and died in the shadow of a crown.
Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore’s enjoyment of playing the manipulative and ambitious Mary Villiers is almost tangible. DC Moore creates the series starting from real historical events and Julianne Moore also signs on as executive producer, giving us an interpretation that does not disappoint but above all a great visual quality. Costumes, sets, settings: everything is perfect, accurate, wrapped in photography which finally – not everyone’s merit – is evocative but clear even in the darkest sequences. In historical dramas, you often want to adjust the brightness of the TV to be able to see something on the screen. Mary & George does not make this necessary and immediately immerses us in the atmosphere of the time. Since the birth of George, with that unusual birth that opens the pilot episode, in the year of our Lord 1592.
But the next sequence is no joke either: we see George, an adult, hanging from a tree. Alive, of course, as his mother knows very well. Enough to roll your eyes, say good morning and drag him down. George does everything, including pretending to kill himself, to avoid the trip to France that will teach him good manners and a lot of other things, all clearly foreseen in his mother’s program. Mothers of the sixteenth century, here it is: Mary Villiers is there to show you the way to transform your beloved children into means of socio-economic advancement. Also, because the eldest son John has neither George’s charm nor intelligence, and the other children almost seem to be a hindrance to the ambitious Mary. The only one who can make his mother’s dreams come true is that boy destined to study to become the King’s favorite. And you can bet that he will succeed if this is what Mary wants.
Thus, while George in France, so to speak, broadens his horizons in a noble residence where orgies are usually consumed as if they were elegant receptions, Mary finds herself a husband worthy of the name, so much so that she soon becomes the guest of Her Majesty in person. King James, as a good sovereign of England (and of Scotland, with the name of James VI), is much more concerned with his well-being than with the fate of his people and dedicates himself much more to debauchery and sensual pleasure than to business of State. If this were not the case, Mary’s plans would have been ruined. Mary & George tells us a piece of history in which sex, food, wine, and all sorts of pleasure and experimentation take the place, among the rich and noble, of the hard work to eat and pay the taxes that dominate the lives of the people.
We are in an era in which spirituality is non-existent, the flesh is central in every sense, and everyone thinks of their own well-being, regardless of others and the value – assuming they have any – of other people’s lives. It is the consequences of these lives devoted to pleasure that will lead, centuries later, to repressive Victorian moralism. In history, as we know, much happens through contrast. And if there is a historical moment that stands in contrast to the reign of Queen Victoria, it is precisely this. So, expect lots of sex. Intrigues and plots. Poisoned plums and homosexual relationships – moreover experienced in a much more natural way in 1600 than in the future, if we think that in England homosexuality was a crime with arrest until 1967.
But even the sexual freedom of the era of the series applies – openly – only to the privileged of society, ça va sans dire. Mary Villiers and her plan for George are wonderfully bold. Benjamin Wolley’s book entitled The King’s Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I, released in 2017, is the basis from which Mary & George draws characters and historical facts. Adding light-hearted fun and sequences that recall those of The Tudors, although this family makes them look like the Teletubbies. The King’s favorite when Mary meets him for the first time, in the house of her new husband (Sir Thomas Compton, Sean Gilder), is the Earl of Somerset (Laurie Davidson, The Perfect Deception). And you can also swear: our Count will not easily give up the role of favorite to the newcomer. Because privileges are defended in any way, and at any cost.
While Mary works to place her other children in the right place, anyone who tries to get in her way enters a game in which the stakes rise episode after episode. Mary & George is a sumptuous series, in every way. It tells us about historical characters and real stories while showing us a society in which the only thing that matters is physical appearance, but above all the awareness of one’s appearance. Luckily, when it’s not just the kids who get there, the “monstrous mother” takes care of it. Although, as per the trailer, “only children believe in monsters” it… Partly a costume story from the 17th century that dares to narrate the women behind the patriarchal power of the English court, on the other hand, Mary & George is nevertheless the perfect and brazen reversal of the same chauvinist system that it aims to face. And the series (partly) directed by British director Oliver Hermanus (recently behind the camera of the multiple Oscar-nominated Living with Bill Nighy) is also and above all a proudly queer narration of the court of King James I.
The sovereign played by a very good Tony Curran (fans of television series will remember the unforgettable and moving Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who with Matt Smith) is depicted as a cultured and resolute monarch, married to the permissive Queen Anne of Denmark (Trine Dyrholm) but surrounded by ephebic and androgynous courtiers ready to satisfy his most hidden and libertine side. Above all, the King’s favorite Robert Carr, the 1st Earl of Somerset (Laurie Davidson) and well-known lover of the first monarch of the Stuart dynasty. A privileged position, that of Somerset, which will be progressively undermined by George Villiers, yin and yang of the double soul of the miniseries produced by Sky Studios; emblematic figure and character with the sexual fluidity necessary to frame a piece of British history that rejects any documentary veracity in favor of the much more comfortable and (frankly) tempting rumors about the sexual orientation of King James I. Between feminism of the past and the defense of gender diversity, Mary & George distances itself from history to become a forerunner of certain rights and equality that the United Kingdom will only experience centuries later.
Intriguing in the truest sense of the term, DC Moore’s miniseries with Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine grips the viewer and fascinates him. Far from wanting to offer its target audience a philological lesson in English history, Mary & George is more concerned with playing the cards of charm and seduction at the royal court, staging a brazenly captivating queer-tinged historical drama. The Sky miniseries is a seventeenth-century fresco for the small screen which, in its visual structure, is more reminiscent of the consciously lively chromatic contradictions of Peter Greenaway in his Nightwatching (2007) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and the Lover (1989), which is the grotesque representation of the European courts of the 17th and 18th centuries by Tony McNamara, screenwriter of The Favorite by Yorgos Lanthimos and the comedy series The Great with Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. But less authorial and more pop.
Mary & George Review: The Last Words
In the truest sense of the term, DC Moore’s miniseries with Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine intrigues and fascinates. Far from wanting to offer the viewer a philological lesson in English history, Mary & George is more concerned with playing the cards of charm and seduction at the royal court, staging a queer-tinged historical drama that is certainly captivating. An identity based on brilliant, engaging, and entertaining writing; in a clean direction that pays homage to historical dramas thanks to its saturated colors, well-studied shots, and the light that always creates the right settings for the scene being told and finally the two protagonists masterfully played by Julian Moore who is always impeccable in the role of the ambitious mother willing to bend her children to achieve her goals, but manipulative enough to make them believe that her goals are their dreams too; and Nicholas Galitzine who perfectly embodies the role of the puppet guided by his mother and her desires.
Mary & George Review: More Concerned with Playing the Cards Of Charm And Seduction At The Royal Court - Filmyhype
Director: DC Moore
Date Created: 2024-04-07 13:14
4
Pros
- The icy and ruthless charisma of Julianne Moore
- The Rising Charm of Nicholas Galitzine
- The captivating historical reconstruction of the reign of James I
- The queerness of the 17th century English court
Cons
- The lack of historical veracity
- Too few episodes to tell a very large story
- We would have liked to know more about Tony Curran's James I
