The Public Life of the Sixth Wife

Katherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of the British monarch Henry VIII, has never gotten much attention from the movies -- there's 1933's The Private Life of Henry VIII and 1953's Young Bess, the 20-year-separate pair that both star Charles Laughton as the larger-than-life despot, offing his brides one by one. And Parr does get some proper attention in the latter where she is played by Deborah Kerr and is shown being instructive to Princess Elizabeth (Jean Simmons), soon to be the formidable Queen for several decades. 

Enter Firebrand, the lush and lavish and darkly devastating new period piece from Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz, who in 2019 gave us one of the great films of the new millennium with Invisible Life (one of my favorite films of that year). (Also as a sidenote: Aïnouz's 2011 film The Silver Cliff, which has never gotten any kind of release here in the U.S. save one screening here in NYC that I was fortunate enough to be at, is also a masterpiece and god I want to see it again.) Starring Alicia Vikander at her most quietly determined as Parr and an almost unrecognizably disgusting Jude Law as her husband the King, Firebrand finally gives Parr her due, while also giving Vikander a fine role suited to her quiet strengths.

Narrated by the Princess and Queen-to-be Elizabeth (a watchful Junia Rees), Firebrand is also framed, like Young Bess was, as the story of how that iconic future monarch -- one who's never fallen into the short-on-biopics camp -- would learn from Parr how to manage being both a woman and a leader at once. Mostly set across a small stretch of time where Henry runs off to do some warmongering and Parr momentarily takes over the throne, becoming the Regent in his absence, there are lessons here that fall into the pro and the anti camp for Elizabeth, behaviorally speaking, and she's always lurking in the background soaking them up.

But this is very much Katherine's story. Frustrating, tragic, but also illuminating -- the author of several prayer books (including the first book ever published by a Queen under her own name), Parr was a woman centuries before her time, and she paid for it. Vikander, so slight and yet somehow never once lost under these enormous and elaborate (and really very gorgeous) costumes, brings a silent ferocity to the woman -- she's smarter than almost anyone around her, and yet her intelligence keeps tripping her up in a world that sees no value in an intelligent woman. 

Katherine's contradictions are her downfall -- prone to visiting with heretics and openly flirting with her ex Sir Thomas Seymour (Sam Riley, looking good enough in his ginger ZZ Top beard that he makes open flirting understandable), she knows she's playing with fire in Henry's eyes. The man has already gone through five wives at this point! And yet she also sees that Henry is drawn to her fire too, and she finds it irresistible -- she wants to use her power to possibly enact real change, standing as they do on the cusp of the Reformation. She is a true believer, and she sees that possibility. She just tries to jump ahead a little too fast.

Katherine's under-told story aside, Jude Law nevertheless very nearly steals the film from Vikander, even though hubby Henry doesn't plod into the film until its midway point. Bringing to mind Olivia Colman's petulant Queen Anne in The Favourite, with her weeping sores and wounded ego, both monarchs are illustriously disgusting figures -- Anne remained mostly relatable though, at least in comparison to Law's Henry, who's nothing but pus and sexual appetite and a bottomless jealousy where his heart should go. Law's Henry bellows at god in fury for every perceived slight, and then some part of him immediately starts leaking. This is a Henry on his last leg, as it were, but he'll bring down the entire house with him if he must. And obviously he must. Anyway Law savors and devours every grunt -- getting to be ugly and awful never looked so rancidly delicious -- we can practically taste the poisonous spittle coming off the screen. It's a lot! But I believed every second.

There are bits of history that get shuffled about in Firebrand's last act that I won't wander into for spoiler's sake, but they don't really matter too much -- we're not talking about an Inglourious Basterds type of historical rewrite here. What does matter is that Aïnouz and his screenwriters, the sisters Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth, fashion a quietly compelling tale of agency dashed upon the rocks. Broken and battered until somebody, just ahead, manages to pick up the pieces and put them together in a new way, a way that might just work this time out. It's about small steps, two back for every forward, and what we learn in those seeming death spirals. We just keep pressing on -- every thing done is a thing that matters, and some day our stories will get told.