Film Pick of the Week: Firebrand - review by Yvette Huddleston
Firebrand Prime Video, review by Yvette Huddleston
Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s revisionist portrait of Katherine Parr, the last of Henry VIII’s six wives – the one who survived – is an entertaining flight of imagination, yet remains relatively faithful to the historical facts.
Adapted by screenwriting sisters Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth from the 2013 novel by Elizabeth Fremantle, the film opens in the summer of 1544 while Henry (Jude Law) is over in France on another campaign and has left Katherine (Alicia Vikander) as his regent. She has been carrying out her duties efficiently and is a little disappointed when Henry returns from France earlier than expected. The mostly tranquil and loving little family of Katherine, her stepdaughters Mary and Elizabeth and young stepson Edward is disrupted by the King’s return. Everything becomes unpredictable when he is around.
Katherine is not much liked by some of Henry’s advisers, particularly bishop Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale), who suspect her of Protestant sympathies and the Ashworths’ script embellishes this. It takes the real-life figure of writer, poet and Protestant preacher Anne Askew (played here by Erin Doherty) who was condemned as a heretic during Henry’s reign and establishes a link between her and Katherine Parr, presenting them as close childhood friends. Katherine takes an enormous risk by riding out into the countryside to find the encampment where Askew and her followers are hiding out and warns her friend to stop preaching.
Meanwhile Henry is keen to ensure that Katherine provides him with ‘a spare’, another boy child and eventually the queen does fall pregnant. Her own survival depends on the child she is carrying as her husband becomes distant and petulant, controlling and manipulative, jealous and suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Thomas Seymour (Sam Riley), the brother of his fifth wife and uncle to his son Edward. Jude Law is a commanding presence – and almost unrecognisable – as the irascible monarch. Increasingly paranoid, in constant pain from his ulcerous leg and hugely overweight, he is a profoundly unhappy and angry man. His household is constantly on edge, awaiting the next explosion of rage that could easily result in someone losing their head. Vikander holds her own against Law’s barnstorming performance with a stillness that is equally powerful.
If you want a more historically accurate depiction of the era, stick with the current majestic BBC drama series Wolf Hall, but for a fine, rousing, feminist take on the latter part of Henry’s bloody reign, this makes for a compelling watch.