There's the phrase “breathes new life into old material” and then there's the feat achieved by production designer turned filmmaker Derek Jarman with his adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's nearly four hundred year old play via the 1991 New Queer Cinema masterpiece, Edward II.
Inspired by the reign of the openly gay fourteenth century monarch, in Jarman's hands, Marlowe's 1593 work, originally dubbed The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer, becomes all the more urgent given the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and England's increasingly homophobic policies resulting in a period of unrest and protest.
Having recently revealed his status as HIV positive, the politically active filmmaking provocateur who once famously said “I didn't have to adapt a cause, I became one,” broke new ground in terms of adaptation from page to stage to screen.
A towering achievement in visual storytelling, according to Jarman's muse and Edward II lead actress Tilda Swinton, the director relished the opportunity the film gave him “to jump right into the echelons of contemporary power in England with whom he felt so at odds.”
Taking advantage of its low budget to be even more experimental, Edward II was filmed without windows, doors, or natural light sources, instead using four block walls as an interchangeable set.
Returning to the kind of creative stage and production design for which he first made his name, Jarman and his crew employ Third Man like shadowy spotlights in one scene before using them altogether differently in an epically romantic sequence where actor Steven Waddington's titular character dances with his lover to Cole Porter's “Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye” sung by Annie Lennox just one block over.
Serving up a constantly evolving, gleefully anachronistic, visceral cocktail which mixes together nude rugby players, Tilda Swinton's Queen Isabella going full vampire in front of her perpetually in-drag son, as well as a full-blown gay rights protest with real life activists, as wild as Edward II gets, Jarman keeps it from spiraling into chaos.
No stranger to unconventional adaptations and biopics, while Edward II is incredibly experimental, Jarman does more than simply use Marlowe's source material as a jumping off point. Impressively, while it's tempting to just simply turn off your brain and see where the chameleon like picture goes next, we're nonetheless riveted to the point that – even when it threatens to lose us – thanks in no small part as well to its first rate cast, we remain as focused on the narrative storyline as we are on the visual one.
Making its Blu-ray debut twenty-seven years after it bowed into film festivals and arthouse theaters courtesy of Film Movement Classics, Edward II has been given the royal treatment in this collectible worthy release.
Filling each of my speakers beautifully to the point that I felt like I could hear the sound pinging off all four of those block walls, following a recent digital restoration, Edward II looks as lush as it sounds.
With a lovingly penned prologue by Tilda Swinton as well as a thought provoking critical essay by Bruce LaBruce, the Blu-ray also boasts a worthwhile, roughly twenty-three minute documentary featurette that delivers new interviews from those working behind and in front of the scenes, including the producers at Working Title, which has come a long way since 1991, continuing to bring us some of the best films from the UK.
Perfectly synced to release during Pride Month, though long revered as a work of New Queer excellence, Edward II has been long absent from Blu-ray and DVD shelves. A fascinating find for this film studies major and straight ally, Film Movement gave classics lovers more to cheer for by choosing the exact same day to also bring us the filmed performance of Maxine Peake as the first female Hamlet in nearly forty years to DVD.
And while it's bittersweet because he's not around to see this release, the same way Christopher Marlowe did for Edward II in his play, and Derek Jarman did for them both in this film, through Edward II, here in 2018, Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, and Derek Jarman continue to live on.
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Coming off the heels of last year’s brilliant but bleak Best Picture winner No Country For Old Men, which 
And why should he? Although he’s been working on his memoirs after impulsively quitting the agency in a hilarious confrontational beginning as he’s officially downgraded for a drinking problem, it’s his unfaithful wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) who compiled the data on the disc as a preemptive strike before serving him with divorce papers. Unbeknownst to either of them, their moves are all being watched as the plot grows increasingly complex and chaotic when the link between the two stories — the kinky governmental employee Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) becomes involved — begins sleeping alternately with Swinton’s Katie and McDormand’s Linda Litzke. And when Osborne proves to be less than cooperative, Linda, desperate to have plastic surgery and oblivious to the earnest affection of her good-natured boss Ted (Richard Jenkins), leads Pitt’s Chad further into an international debacle as they try to sell the “secret shit” to the Russians.
With an advertising campaign comprised of cool Saul Bass-styled posters echoing the classy spy films and Hollywood blockbusters of the late '50s and '60s (the lettering alone looks like Bass’s work on Vertigo), it’s evident that like No Country was sort of the Coen version of a western, this is their version of a spy comedy, yet it’s surprisingly devoid of humor. And that’s quite a shame as again, it had one of the best ad campaigns of 2008.
Like The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, and The Ladykillers, the timing of this one is just plain off and it took a good twenty minutes to garner one genuine laugh, after Malkovich’s grand confrontation which opens the film. Although some audience members did chuckle, even at the oddest of moments as one character slices another in the head with an axe, it all seemed to be as half-hearted as the direction, more in appreciation of the directors themselves than what was actually served up to audiences. This being said, I wasn’t unprepared, knowing fully how “out there” they can go-- having seen, analyzed, and appreciated even some of their strangest works such as Barton Fink and the wood-chipper finale of Fargo. As a film host and critic I have probably explained, championed, and defended their work to friends, audiences, and strangers more than most.
If they truly wanted to make us laugh, we would’ve seen these events with our own eyes, rather than be “told” what happened and it’s not like they were overstaying their welcome with a roughly ninety-five minute running time. Ultimately, the Coens end Burn with the same type of similar dissatisfying aftertaste that became one of the biggest criticisms of last year’s abrupt end to No Country. And possibly to fix this, they could’ve found a way to delete the Clooney and Swinton plot altogether and just give us more of “The Chad” (to quote Charlie’s Angels) so we could relish in his childlike awe upon trying to discover all the “highly classified shit” he can get his hands on.
