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Thursday, March 29, 2007
Your Humble “Tudors” Tutor Checks In…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Clearly, I wouldn’t have made a good Tudor. I cannot tell a lie.
There are 10 episodes in “The Tudors,” Showtime’s visually gorgeous, action-packed series about the young King Henry VIII and his lusty, conniving “Peyton Place”-like court.
Showtime made the first six hourlong episodes available to critics. I watched three.
I simply was too exhausted to go on.
Episode One starts with a bloody murder. Next comes the decision by one of the early 16th-century world’s superpowers to go to war against a rival superpower. Then Henry (a determinedly vital Jonathan Rhys Meyers) romps around the bedchamber with a woman who not only isn’t his wife. Lady Elizabeth Blount (Ruta Gedmintas) also is no lady, if her cuckolded husband and the many “this is premium cable” shots of her bare breasts are any indication.
All this occurs within the first six minutes. What, pray tell, will they come up with for the next 594?
Plenty, it seems. Which is what “The Tudors” has working for it, and against it. There’s a guilty-pleasure tingle that comes from watching this attempt to let a little air into the creaky old Henry VIII legend via colorful scenes of jousting tournaments, and an elaborate treaty-signing ceremony where wine spouts from the castle walls and two crowned heads of state engage in a shirts-off wrestling match. Then there are such noble-meets-nefarious characters as the quietly backstabbing Cardinal Who Would Be Pope Thomas Wolsey (Sam Neill) and Sir Thomas Boleyn (Nick Dunning), who tries to redraw the palace depth chart by pimping out his daughter, Anne, to the married king.
But the downside to this constant, albeit beautifully staged barrage of plots, subplots and characters is that it’s easy to confuse your Dukes of Norfolk and Buckingham, your Kings of France and Spain. At least The Man’s still only got the one wife at this point, the older, stolid Katherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy). But their toddler daughter, Mary, is herself promised in marriage to two different monarchs as political alliances shift in these early episodes.
By Episode 3, when Henry ping-pongs between ordering up an invasion and a new warship, indulging in some archery practice, and dispatching Sir Thomas More (Jeremy Northam) to burn every book by that “heretic” Martin Luther, viewers might feel the urge to consult Ye Olde CliffsNotes to “The Tudors.” Including its woefully needed chapter on Putting Things in Context.
“My Henry is new,” Michael Hirst, the creator/writer/executive producer of “The Tudors’” says in his press notes. “He’s never been portrayed this way.”
Problem is, “The Tudors” goes off in too many ways all at once. Hirst is correct when he says that the standard TV and movie portrait of Henry VIII — gluttonous, hirsute and all “off with her head”-y when it came to his six wives — is too one-dimensional and played out. The young Henry who ascended to the throne at 18 was learned, athletic and the pre-Elizabethan equivalent of a rock star, says star Rhys Meyers.
“Anybody who’s been ordained by God and who owns their own country has a certain amount of arrogance,” Rhys Meyers says of the monarch who is 29 when “The Tudors” begins and ages approximately one year per episode. “He’s intellectual and he’s zealous. But he’s also aggressive and insecure, vulnerable — all those things.”
Maybe that’s why he comes off in these first few episodes as an intermittently intriguing circa-1520 cross between a multitasking CEO and an overgrown rich kid with too many toys and not enough Ritalin. Henry moves everywhere at warp speed and he never dallies long; after spending just over a minute making the case for war against France to his counsellors in Sunday’s opening episode, he declares, “Now I can go play,” and heads off in search of God knows what pleasure.
Motivations, too, are shadowy and confusingly shifting. One moment, Henry suggests war is necessary to check France’s dangerous ambition. A little later he dreamily tells More he wants to be remembered like Henry V, whose defeat of the French at Agincourt “made him famous … it made him immortal.”
Those two impetuses aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive — just as Wolsey could be simultaneously serving two gods (doing what’s best for England and his own church career) with his furtive foreign policy meddling. But “The Tudors” is so busy being beautifully busy, it doesn’t take time in these crucial early episodes to connect the dots that could expose and illuminate the complex personalities nestled inside the larger-than-life personas.
Watching “The Tudors” is, one suspects, a lot like what it must have been like to move in young King Henry VIII’s circle. Both are wildly ambitious, fast-paced and fascinating to look at. You feel like you’re supposed to like them more than you really do. Still, you never know what either one will get up to next, so when Episode 4 airs next month, I’ll be ready to resume watching.
Until then, quoth the rock star king: I can go play.
“The Tudors” 10 p.m. Sundays on Showtime Grade: B-
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