(2.5 stars)
Set in 1546, “Firebrand” opens with a fairy-tale-like intro delivered by a teenage Princess Elizabeth (Junia Rees): “In a rotten, blood-soaked island kingdom, cursed by plague and riven by religious unrest, there once was a queen by the name of Katherine Parr.” That much is true, if perhaps hyperbolic in its grim assessment of 16th-century England.
Throughout the film, this queen to be, daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, the beheaded Anne Boleyn, seems to watch and wait in the wings for her own ascendancy to the throne 13 years later. This is no origin story, however.
The virgin queen is not the subject of this ahistoric Tudor drama, which plays so fast and loose with the facts at times that the narrator should be taken only as the most unreliable of witnesses. Katherine, the sixth and last wife of King Henry (Jude Law), who survived her notoriously fickle — even violently mercurial — husband, is the putative firebrand.
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The choice of title is a strange one. Played by an equally watchful and waiting — almost inert — Alicia Vikander, Katherine is, for much of the film, something of a fizzling cipher as she patiently endures indignities at the hands of her husband.
Fire does figure prominently elsewhere: in the burning of plague-infected garments, banned books and, at times, Protestants accused of heresy against the Church of England. But the only traditional incendiaries in the story are the radical Protestant preacher Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a friend of Katherine’s, and Henry’s minion, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, played by an inquisitorial Simon Russell Beale.
“I know what you are capable of,” Anne tells Katherine, after the queen has secretly visited her against the wishes of Henry, head of the Church of England, and Gardiner, who keeps a gimlet eye on those who would go too far in challenging orthodoxy in Reformation-era Britain.
Anne may know what Katherine is capable of. We, on the other hand, are made to wait until the end to learn just what the character is all about. Her emergence as a heroine worthy of a 21st-century audience is a doozy, one you won’t find in any history book. It is, however, the premise of Elizabeth Fremantle’s 2013 novel, “Queen’s Gambit,” from which this revisionist feminist take on Tudor court drama has been adapted by screenwriting sisters Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth (with additional writing by Rosanne Flynn) and directed by Karim Ainouz (“Invisible Life”).
Ainouz captures the look and feel of the time, with sumptuous costumes by Michael O’Connor and handsome production design by Helen Scott. The central, quasi-Shakespearean intrigue — which revolves around Katherine’s potential exposure as a co-conspirator of Askew — is also handled adroitly, even if many of the scenes simply feature Henry’s gratuitously cruel efforts to humiliate Katherine.
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He forces her to taste his food at a public dinner, presumably for poison. Other scenes show him sticking his fingers lasciviously deep into Katherine’s mouth; openly flirting with a prospective mistress; and accusing Katherine of infidelity with Thomas Seymour (Sam Riley), a former lover as Fremantle’s book has it, whom Katherine would in fact go on to marry after Henry’s death.
There’s also a scene that borders on sexual assault, and another in which Katherine is made to change the pus-soaked bandages on her husband’s ulcerating leg wound, the result of a 10-year-old jousting injury. At times like these, and when we watch Henry’s bare bum writhing atop Katherine during joyless sex, Ainouz seems to enjoy torturing us almost as much as Henry does Katherine.
But at least Law fills the screen with energy, reveling in Henry’s malignant narcissism with a mesmerizing, maniacal sadism. One wishes to see the titular firebrand stand up to his suppurating cruelty much sooner than she eventually does.
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“There is more than one way to scorch the earth,” Elizabeth cautions us late in the film, presumably by way of explaining why we’ve been made to bide so much time without an emotional payoff.
A kind of satisfaction ultimately arrives, but it is not one for purists, or even lovers of speculative history. It feels tacked on: too little, too late, too ludicrous — the past rewritten as a form of wishful thinking.
R. At AMC’s Hoffman Center 22 and Rio Cinemas 18. Contains violence, brief gory images and shots of ugly wounds, sexuality, nudity, and mature thematic elements. 120 minutes.
