The Favourite

And The Jailhouse Snitch

At the time I went to prison (2014), I did not have “the director of ‘Dogtooth’ becomes an Oscar sweetheart” on my Bingo card. That’s mostly because you can’t write things in on your Bingo card, it’s not some free-association lottery, and no one has ever won Bingo by actually writing real-life events on it, because that would probably involve a Bingo game that lasted more than a day, maybe even a month, and I don’t think I have the attention span for such a thing, and also I’m not young but I’m probably not in the right age demographic for Bingo anyway, and I also don’t think “Dogtooth” is a movie that you’d see mentioned on a lot of Bingo cards even if you could write things on there.

Anyway, “The Favourite”.

This is a spin on the usual costume movie, a genre I tend to (maybe inaccurately?) refer to as Polite Cinema. Polite Cinema always takes place in an earlier time, usually a Victorian-era. Characters are obsessed with propriety and courtship and no one gets terribly mad and no one has a physical fight that lasts very long. And every character wanders about as if that place in time didn’t smell awful, because no one was using deodorant or fragrances. Paradoxically, the characters act as if none of them have ever had a bowel movement. Wouldn’t be gallant, wouldn’t be ladylike. Generally, on principle, I hate this.

Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of “Dogtooth” and this, makes movies where people have bowel movements. They excrete all sorts of bodily substances. They cry, they urinate, they definitely bleed, and they often just keel over and die. In a Lanthimos movie, it’s 50/50 you’re gonna see boogers. If he made a Marvel movie, Thor would have the squirts upon eating Earth food, and Spider-Man would release webbing from parts beyond your interests. Or from parts you adore, because who knows what kind of freaks are reading this? Hey, freaks, subscription is free!

Olivia Colman is Queen Anne, who is sickly and distracted during wartime. Infertile and lonely, she’s been engaging in a dalliance with a Duchess (Rachel Weisz), who enjoys a cozy perch alongside the Queen due to her varied sexual favors. Though lower in class, the Duchess’ cousin (Emma Stone) arrives and the Queen is quickly besotted by this younger, easier-to-manipulate model. There is the suggestion the ladies will band together in their own lesbian threeway relationship by using the weapon of secrecy against foppy jerk Nicolas Hoult. But of course, eventually they are at their own throats, angling for power. 

This is a newer take on an old favo(u)rite – the idea that history as we know it was shaped by horny idiots simply angling to be on top of the food chain. Fiddling (in this case, diddling!) while Rome burns, etc. Where this shines is from the all-out performances by the Oscar-approved cast, and because of Lanthimos’ anthropological take on human behavior. This is maybe the least-scatological of his works, but the way the camera glides through Queen Anne’s many hallways and bedrooms emphasizes that these are such small people next to all that complex artifice. In seeking power, it feels as if each character is getting smaller and smaller. Unbeknownst to their dumb urges, the Queen herself is always in varying states of power, but she remains the most forceful and demanding angle of this particular triangle, even throughout what a lack of medical advances illustrates as a deteriorating body. 

These backroom dealings made me think of the jailhouse snitches in prison, those who were entirely too close to the guards. There were always a few guys who felt more than comfortable going to the officers’ offices seemingly to shoot the breeze, all the while they would be involved in every illegal activity happening on the yard. Men would have no problem associating with this person, until the one day the guards arrived at their bunk, ready to steal their contraband and take them to the SHU. I can understand how inmates would find something to gain from this. But I couldn’t stomach the occasional sight of these men walking away from the Lieutenant’s Office with a pocketful of stamps, a form of currency on the yard that carried almost no value to the officers who dispensed with them.

I knew of one man who snitched his way to freedom. There was a story of a guy with a contraband cell phone who was leasing it to others on an hourly basis, which was common. He found out that some of the people he was doing business with were sex criminals who were looking up child pornography. He went to staff with this information, and in response, they staged a siege. They placed a chip inside the phone to record the phone’s actions, and when he returned the phone to staff, the officers attacked. 

I was in the SHU when I found out the FBI stormed the compound, taking away dozens of inmates who allegedly used that phone. Allegedly, the inmate who owned the phone was well on his way home after all that, and several inmates now received additional charges. I don’t know what to call that type of bootlicking – prison didn’t work for any of these men, clearly. But you haven’t stopped pornographers from being pornographers.