Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

You'd think that the starter of this thread would make more of an effort to see this movie, but the reviews didn't make it sound all that great. My first problem was with the locations: it seems like half of the film was shot in Glencoe, which is beautiful, but on the other side of Scotland from where the action happened. Holyrood Palace is in Edinburgh, which was a decent-sized city at the time.

I thought the general sequence of events was portrayed fairly accurately early on, but with some omissions or over-simplification later on. The idea of Rizzio as gay is not actually unique to this film, in previous versions of this story it was used to explain how he could be such a close companion of the Queen without fear of adultery.

Crucially, they did not show that Mary's marriage to Bothwell was a Protestant ceremony, something the staunchly Catholic Mary would not have entered freely: her hand was forced. So, at the same time as John Knox was accusing her of having Darnley murdered and marrying the murderer, she lost her Catholic support, leaving her with few allies on either side. Historically, the details of her marriage to Bothwell are crucial in explaining Mary's fall from grace and what happened afterwards.

The events after Mary's abdication are also glossed over, such as how she raised an army to confront the lords who forced her abdication, but which deserted and left her with no option but to try to escape to France. The escape attempt is completely left out: after the fictionalised conversation with Elizabeth, the film cuts straight to Mary in captivity, and her end.

I understand the artistic license that filmmakers have, to change history and imagine different outcomes. In this I'm reminded of Tarantino's last couple of movies, which deviated from history too. By the time Mary, Queen of Scots was executed, she was much older and in poor health, which was not shown here, but I can accept that the execution scene was portrayed from Elizabeth's imagination, not as it was.

But when I think of you, I see not an aged woman, but rather the young, resplendent queen whose portrait I first gazed upon five and twenty years ago, and whose beauty shone so brightly when we met, despite her despair.