Firebrand (2023)

Katherine Parr is often the least-focused on of Henry VIII’s wives. The only one to “outlast him,” and a reformist in her own right, she now has a film devoted to her called Firebrand, although the reason for the title is rather ambiguous. It’s a beautiful production with excellent acting and some nice foreshadowing in terms of later historical events, but also has inconsistent characters and suffers from a feminist need to rewrite history.

The passionate Puritan reformer Anne Askew (a luminous Erin Doherty) has been preaching radical beliefs in the woods not far from one of the royal palaces. Eager to reunite with her childhood friend, Queen Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), left regent in the absence of her obese and ailing husband in his most recent war in France, travels there under a cloak of secrecy to warn her former friend not to speak against her husband. The fiery Anne laughs off her concerns and presses her to do more than write her nice little prayer books. But Katherine knows she has to be delicate in her interactions with her hot-tempered husband and his Bishop Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale), who wants to sniff out the heretics among them and put them to death.

When her husband (Jude Law) returns sooner than anyone planned, Katherine makes a mistake that could cost her everything if anyone found out about it, and then must play the devoted wife to a bad-humored husband who poisoned one wife and let her rot, and whacked the heads off two more, and who has lately begun to cast an unfavorable and suspicious eye upon her.

I’m not sure what to think of this film; there were moments it swept me away and made me feel as if I were truly back in time. The costumes are highly accurate, and avoid the usual pitfalls of these kinds of productions (all the women wear their hair up, and have proper French hoods). Each scene is beautiful, like a painting. And the cast is quite good. But the script is all over the place, and some of the decisions of the characters make zero sense in terms of their overall arcs. First, the plot meanders, then gets tight and focused, then meanders again. We spend a lot of time cringing about the horrendous behavior of Henry at court, who has been reduced to a childish menace who likes to throw tantrums and physically abuse his wife. And then there’s all the giggling. At one point, Princess Elizabeth asks Mary why she’s laughing, because what she is talking about (her mother’s traumatic fate) isn’t funny; I wondered that too. I guess it’s meant to imply that everyone is so terrified and terrorized at court, all of their emotions are on the surface and their only response is nervous laughter, but it’s awkward. Also, weird and awkward are scenes of Henry being creepy with the ladies of the court (examining their teeth, sticking his fingers in their mouths, etc.) and having “intimate relations” with his wife (including one long scene in which we see a body double’s obese butt cheeks jiggling around… eww). I could have done without the two sex scenes (we get it, he’s gross and she’s unhappy), and particularly without the attempted rape in which he causes her to miscarry.

The cast is quite good. Jude Law wore a feces-laced perfume on set to get an accurate gag reflex from his costars, who put in decent performances. None more than the criminally under-used Erin Doherty. But historical inaccuracies abound; as the film tells us, history is often told by the winners, and then Elizabeth informs us at the end that no one much questioned what really happened. And that’s where the fantasy kicks in. Spoiler. Catherine winds up murdering the king, I guess for putting her best friend to death. But… the film only shows us two scenes with Anne, both of them brief. She dies off-screen rather early in the story. There are no flashbacks of them together to establish their friendship and make us care about them. I honestly expected Anne to be a much bigger part of the story and for a lot of the tension, grief, and horror to come from her arrest, brutal interrogation, and eventual execution. But the film “tells” us and doesn’t “show us” things like that. It also raises the question of why a woman who is firmly convinced that God put her on the throne to change Henry’s mind would turn around and kill him (she says she is ready for hell, and believes she is going there). She then goes on to publish her book of prayers, which makes her seem like a hypocrite. There are other wild inconsistencies as well, such as why Thomas Seymour would risk his life to recover an object that could get her arrested and killed, only to turn it over to his brother to save his own neck.

I understand the book is more about their forbidden love, and the torment they face in being apart, and that may have been a wiser angle to focus on, even though the film does manage to maintain a decent pace in the last twenty minutes. It was a pleasure to see young Elizabeth and Edward, and to feel the vibrations of so much death, pain, and loss in the court, through the constant reminders of the fates of the previous queens. But it left me wanting a bit more, for “Firebrand” to be as much about Anne as Catherine, for their friendship to be the center of the drama rather than Catherine’s abuse at the hands of a man who has become infamous. It left him with no dignity, and reduced him to a man-child, which is in keeping with modern feminist views but doesn’t feel true to history.

Sexual Content:

Two sex scenes (including one with prolonged male rear nudity, in which he feels pain from his leg, and his wife “finishes” him by pleasuring him with her hand), and one attempted rape in which he shoves her to the floor, pulls up her dress, tells her to lie still, and climbs on top of her, but she punches him in his injured leg to get away.

Violence:

The king pushes his wife around and smacks her, throws her to the floor and puts his foot on her, all while accusing her of sleeping with someone else, then tries to assault her; she punches him in his injured leg, causing it to bleed, and runs out of the room with a nosebleed. She has a miscarriage a day or two later as a result, and we see her crying, trying to hold in the child, begging it to “stay inside,” and then blood all over the floor. We see maggots being put into an open wound to feast on the dead flesh; people talk about purification and the certain death of the festering king. Elizabeth is shown dissecting an animal and looking at its entrails. An autopsy is performed (we see doctors pulling out sections of gut). A woman lays down on a man, puts her arm on his windpipe, and strangles him until we hear his windpipe collapse. We hear about a woman being burned to death, and having gunpowder sewn into her dress so she died quickly.

Language:

Several f-words.