Checked out the new indie darling British monarchy costume drama comedy thing The Favourite today. People are calling it one of the best movies of the year… and I don’t get it. I don’t mean I don’t get why they like it – they can like it all they want – I mean I don’t get what the movie was trying to do.

The Favourite is a kind of hipster period piece, maybe. A dark comedy edging on satire about the British royal house under Queen Anne. It kind of seems to exist to maybe satirize in an arch, modernistic way all those stuffy royal/upper class drawing room dramas that always get nominated for Oscars.

Queen Anne is a bumbling idiot who gets manipulated by everyone around her smart enough not to race chickens in the palace. Most of the aristocrats are ridiculous fops with the usual giant wigs who would rather throw fruit at fat naked men or fawn over their racing chickens. In this mess, Rachel Weisz plays Queen Anne’s favourite… a good friend who uses her position to push for her and her lord husband’s political views. Her cousin, played by Emma Stone as a down-on-her-luck former noble-woman, arrives looking for a job. Through cunning and back-stabbery, she claws her way to becoming Queen Anne’s new favourite. And much barbed insults and skullduggery ensues.

The tone of the film starts with a lot of edgy, witty banter and backstabbing. It feels very deliberately modern and arch with a lot of shocking and/or funny uses of four letter words you don’t usually hear in these types of movies. The whole tone and use of fish-eye lenses give the whole movie a very hipsterish feel.

But I’m not sure what for. It works for a while and then, maybe half-way through, most if falls away and we’re just left with the competing backstabbers looking for power. It seems to drop the deliberate weirdness only to occasionally remember to drop in a weird scene. But, really, it’s so uneven and I’m not sure really sure what the quirk was for that the whole movie just doesn’t work for me. What I was left with was an overlong drawing room comic drama that, I dunno, just wasn’t very interesting without that edge working.

I’m probably wrong. Everyone else seems to have fallen under its spell and I’m happy for them. Me? I was impatient with the movie and, even when it was in the flick, the arch intentional quirky odd tone was just a little baffling. I respect, I guess, the desire to puncture the pretentiousness of these types of movies but not sure replacing it with another kind of better-than-though pretension worked in its favor.

Score: 72