Neglected Gem #66: Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2001)

Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2001) is set shortly after the 1849 California Gold Rush and loosely based on Thomas Hardy's emotionally devastating 1886 novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge. But Winterbottom doesn't simply adapt Hardy's powerfully evocative moral drama and recast it in the emerging American West, he cures the film in the poetically elliptical style of Robert Altman's imagined frontier of McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971). Altman's film, which starred Warren Beatty as a gambler with a vision and Julie Christie as the pragmatic madam he loved, was a dreamy, effusive view of the ruggedness of settling the land. The Claim doesn't share the fulsome lyricism of McCabe, but like Altman's western, Winterbottom allows the story to unfold through an evocatively shifting tableau of conflicting moods.

The Curtain Closes and Opens Again: Irina Baronova and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo

Irina Baronova and Anton Dolin in Le Fils Prodigue

I know we are called Critics At Large, but I thought I had better issue a disclaimer that the following piece will hardly be critical. My reason for wanting to write on Irina Baronova, the legendary Russian ballerina who died in 2008 at age 89, is because I am in awe. Her daughter, the Hollywood actress Victoria Tennant, recently published a sumptuous book about her mother (Irina Baronova and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, University of Chicago Press). After I more or less stumbled across it (I found it languishing on a colleague’s desk, undeservedly gathering dust), I instantly fell into a state of rapture. Irina Baronova and Les Ballets Russes is a fittingly gorgeous tribute to a dancer whose glamourous blonde beauty was as celebrated as the precision of her classical technique.

At 256 pages, this biography in words and pictures features 335 colour plates documenting a brilliant life in dance and along way, and because Baronova was intrinsically linked with some of its greatest achievements, the Golden Age of Ballet as experienced during the first half of the 20th century. Just cracking the cover provides an insight into the electrifying mystique of an era dominated by such choreographers as George Balanchine and Mikhail Fokine, to name two of the principal architects of the modern ballet. Baronova had worked closely with these two giants of the dance, among many others, and wrote about them in her 2005 autobiography, Irina: Ballet, Life and Love. Tennant mentions that earlier book at the beginning of hers, describing how her mother’s failing eyesight in old age ultimately prevented her from reading the book she had written. Each day after breakfast, she would lounge on a divan to listen to her daughter read it to her, one thrilling page at a time. Tennant is one of three children born to Baronova and husband, the late British theatre agent Cecil Tennant who died in 1967 as a result of a motoring accident. After her mother’s death in New South Wales in Australia, where she had lived in 2000, she moved there to be close to her second child, her namesake Irina. She soon received a package in the mail from her sister in which were plastic bags holding countless photographs and other memorabilia from Baronova’s life at the eye of a ballet storm.

A Trite and Tiresome Trip: Force Majeure

I’ve always been puzzled and annoyed as to why certain foreign language films get distribution in Canada while other, often more deserving, movies, don’t, leaving filmgoers to catch them (if they can) at various film festivals and, sometimes, later on DVD. Claire Denis’s best films (Vendredi Soir, 35 Rhums) did not play commercially here (though they did in the U.S.) but one of her worst movies Bastards did. Similarly, Jan Troell’s very fine movie The Last Sentence, his spiky biography of anti-Nazi Swedish publisher, Torgny Segerstedt, only made the festival circuit while Force Majeure (Turist in its Swedish release) by Troell’s fellow Swede, Ruben Östlund, not only received a commercial release but is doing well at the box office. It’s even Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, which means it could get nominated and actually win that lofty prize. That would be unfortunate, as Force Majeure is one tiresome, irritating and ultimately trivial concoction, a movie that’s not nearly as smart or as meaningful as its creator, no doubt, considers it to be. In fact, if the title wasn’t already taken, I’d call it "Much Ado About Nothing."

Crippled: The Theory of Everything

Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything

I haven’t found a theory to explain everything in the universe, but I have come up with a theory about The Theory of Everything: it’s a shallow, tame adaptation of Jane Hawking’s memoir, diluted to the point of tedium in order to appeal to a broad audience, content to pass over the interesting and challenging aspects of Stephen Hawking’s life in order to present a clichéd love plot. But that’s just a theory – you’ll have to see it as well before we can make this an empirical exercise.

The film begins in the 1960s, when a young and able-bodied Hawking (a very admirable Eddie Redmayne) is studying astrophysics at Cambridge. His infatuation with literature student Jane (button-cute Felicity Jones) coincides with the first stirrings of his impending motor neuron disease, and we follow them as they marry, build a family, and finally separate due to the strain the disease places on them both.

Side Show and Allegro: Another Go-Round

Ryan Silverman, Emily Padgett, Erin Davie and Matthew Hydzik in Side Show (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Opening on Broadway in 1997, Side Show lasted only about three months; the current revival, staged by Bill Condon, is the first version I’ve had a chance to see. Written by Henry Krieger (music) and Bill Russell (book and lyrics), it’s a semi-fictionalized account of the lives of the conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, born in England to an unmarried barmaid and then displayed in America by abusive adoptive parents. In the musical, an unemployed talent scout named Terry Connor sees them in a side show in San Antonio in the early days of the Depression, gets his song-and-dance-man pal Buddy Foster to teach them to sing and dance, and encourages them to sue the proprietor – Sir, their foster father – for their freedom. They win, and Terry puts them on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.

A Journalist’s Legacy: Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone

Anthony Shadid (1968-2012) in Libya, March 2011. Photo by Fohlen Corentin.

There are some people who, at least retroactively, define a period in your life; you look back from a later vantage point and realize that they impacted you in ways that you were completely unaware of, and that their influence on your life continues to evolve. Anthony Shadid is one of those people for me.

In 2002, I was a raw almost-adult living in California as the Second (or al-Aqsa) Intifada raged in Israel and Palestine. My father was covering events there for an American newspaper. One day, on the way home from school, I heard a brief mention on the radio: “A journalist for [my father’s newspaper] was shot by Israeli forces outside the residence of Yasser Arafat. His status is unknown.” And I completely freaked out—several frantic phone calls to the Foreign Desk later, I got through to my father, sounding tired and exhausted. “It was Anthony,” he said. “We got him out, and he’s in surgery.”

A Pining Spirit: Perth County Conspiracy...Does Not Exist

This piece is an edited and revised version of a script I wrote for the radio documentary "Dream Time: The Story of Perth County Conspiracy...Does Not Exist" for CBC Radio's Inside the Music. 

Back in 1970, the passions of the Sixties counter-culture seemed spent. The Beatles, who had inspired the communal spirit of that age, had bitterly broken up. For one thing, John Lennon had just declared that the dream was over. George Harrison then wistfully told us that all things must pass. But not so in Canada. That same year, singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn gently urged us to go to the country. Joni Mitchell lamented getting back to the garden in her song about the Woodstock Festival. And in Stratford, Ontario, a town known for its Shakespearean Festival, a group of musicians, actors and a café owner converged to create a folk/rock ensemble calling itself Perth County Conspiracy. Every night, in a local haunt called The Black Swan, run by proprietor Harry Finley, musicians Richard Keelan and Cedric Smith began to work their magic at midnight. With a collection of politically irreverent and mystical songs, they created a challenging theatrical experience for those curious Stratford Festival patrons looking for something a little unexpected and out of the ordinary.

Neglected Gem #65: My Son the Fanatic (1997)

Om Puri in My Son the Fanatic

Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay for My Son the Fanatic (which he adapted from one of his stories) takes you right back to the glory days of Cinema Four, in the mid-eighties, when he and Stephen Frears turned out My Beautiful Laundrette and Neil Jordan made Mona Lisa and five or six times a year something fresh and provocative came out of England or Ireland. It has the kind of complicated humor you find in Kureishi’s best novels, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album.

In fact, one of the big influences on Kureishi and his collaborator, the director Udayan Prasad – like Kureishi, a gifted Anglo-Pakistani with an eye for the mixed pleasures of the cultural mix – is Mona Lisa; the other is Taxi Driver. The irresistibly warm, larger-than-life actor Om Puri, who’s sort of a Pakistani equivalent to Topol (the star of the screen version of Fiddler on the Roof), plays Parvez, a London taxi driver who revels in the joys of assimilation. He listens to Sarah Vaughan and Louis Armstrong – though his wife Minoo (Gopi Desai), who’s more traditional, complains that the music he loves is “too trumpety.” Parvez finds himself drawn, sexually and emotionally, to one of his customers, a white whore named Bettina (Rachel Griffiths). His best friend, Fizzy (Harish Patel, in a merry performance), runs a successful restaurant; he’s a very model of the immigrant whose new life has turned out to be a triumph. And Parvez’s son Farid (Akbar Kurtha) is engaged to a young white woman, the daughter of a police chief. But whereas Parvez hears a welcoming note in his new in-laws’ reception of Farid’s family, Farid hears condescension and implicit resentment (and he’s probably correct). So he walks out on his fiancée, who seems to love him very much, and embraces fundamentalist Islam. He gets involved with a group of young Muslims whose loyalties are to a rather dim leader; they elect Parvez’s home as the guru’s guest house during his visit to England. They also cook up some trouble: a violent attack on the local prostitutes, whom they see as an embodiment of Anglo vice.

Hizzoner: Dan Harmon

Dan Harmon (left) with members of the cast of Community

The TV creator Dan Harmon has a devoted fan base of comedy geeks and other nerds who revere him for his offbeat sensibility—Gillian Jacobs, one of the cast members on Harmon’s best-known project, Community, credits him with “reaching out to people who aren’t used to be reached out to”—and his equally offbeat career path. Luckily for normal people who might investigate Harmon’s corpus to see what all the noise is about, he’s also a brilliantly original comic talent whose work acquired new depth over the course of the three (out of five) seasons of Community that he wrote on and supervised. When the show premiered in 2009, it looked like a scattershot gag comedy about a bunch of misfits—a smarmily charismatic phony lawyer, a sanctimonious leftie, a movie addict whose immersion in cinematic unreality is sometimes indistinguishable from autism, a fervently Christian single mom—who form a study group at a low-rent community college. Harmon gradually turned it into a forum where he could parody all manner of obsessions from science fiction tropes and role-action game playing to My Dinner with Andre, and he also dug ever deeper into the characters, using their developing relationships with one another to illuminate their fears, delusions, and insecurities.

Heart of Darkness: Foxcatcher

Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in Foxcatcher

Bennett Miller’s 2005 film Capote started out as a literary biopic about the novelist that became something more: an unsettling examination of the title character’s jealousy, self-absorption, and manipulative relationship with Perry Smith, the chief subject of In Cold Blood. His follow-up picture, Moneyball (2011), had a comic tone that belied a similar interest in a solitary male figure – in that case, baseball general manager Billy Beane. With Foxcatcher, he brings these two movies together in a sense, borrowing the dark mood and material from the former, the athletic subject matter from the latter. The film treats Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), an amateur wrestler who won gold at the 1984 Olympics; his brother and coach, Dave (Mark Ruffalo); and the twisted connection they develop with blue blood millionaire John du Pont (Steve Carell). The picture’s really not a sports movie. If Truman Capote’s neuroses came to overshadow the enjoyment of his writing, here the warped psyches of the main characters – especially Mr. Carell’s – occlude the thrill of athletic glory entirely. The film is a picture of a Freudian nightmare. It works by mood and feeling, needling under your skin and leaving a corrosive taste in your mouth.

Rags to Ruin: Blue Ruin

Macon Blair in Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin

 

I love it when indie films show up on Netflix, untethered by restrictive studio release structures and desperate for a wider audience. It often means that I can catch up on films I missed from earlier in the year – like the dark, tense, and oddly beautiful Blue Ruin.

A police cruiser pulls up alongside a dilapidated Pontiac, parked by the boardwalk. Our protagonist, Dwight (Macon Blair) – shaggy, bearded, and filthy – is sleeping inside after a night of scavenging trash bins for food. We think, oh no, the jig is up, but the cop’s not here to arrest him or tell him to get lost. She speaks softly to him, calling him by name, telling him to come with her to the station so she can deliver a hammer blow to what’s left of his life: the man who murdered his parents has been freed from prison. This is the setup of Blue Ruin, directed and written by independent filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier, and it’s both the beginning and the end for poor Dwight.

Schwartz and Dietz, Comden and Green

Michael McKean, Tony Sheldon, and Tracey-Ullman in The Band Wagon (All Photos by Joan Marcus)

Of the great songwriters and songwriting teams of the twenties, thirties and forties, perhaps only Arthur Schwartz (music) and Howard Dietz (lyrics) have fallen into obscurity. That’s less because Schwartz often collaborated with other lyricists (especially Dorothy Fields) than because the shows he and Dietz wrote together haven’t survived.  Some were revues, which are always too topical for revival – The Grand Street Follies of 1926 and 1929, The Little Show and The Second Little Show, Three’s a Crowd, At Home Abroad, Inside U.S.A. The others produced some lovely songs but they divided up into only moderate successes and downright failures. The musical the partners are best known for, The Band Wagon, was reportedly one of the last great revues, brittle and sophisticated – and it boasted a superb score. It was the last show to co-star Fred Astaire and his first and apparently most brilliant dancing partner, his sister Adele, who had played opposite him in the Gershwins’ Lady, Be Good! and Funny Face and whose insouciant flapper personality was iconic for the Jazz Age. After The Band Wagon closed, Adele married a lord and retired from show business, and Fred performed solo in only one more play, Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce, before he trekked west to try his hand in Hollywood.

The irresistibly companionable and hilarious movie entitled The Band Wagon has no connection to the 1931 Broadway show except for the songwriters. Arthur Freed, who ran the musicals unit at M-G-M in the forties and fifties, had the idea of devising a movie to take advantage of the George and Ira Gershwin songbook. George had been dead for nearly a decade and a half when An American in Paris was released in 1951, and it was such a huge hit, even garnering the Academy Award for Best Picture, that two years later Freed produced The Band Wagon (1953), which essentially did the same for Schwartz and Dietz. (Vincente Minnelli directed both movies.) The team wrote one new song for the picture, “That’s Entertainment,” and Schwartz supplied the music for the “Girl Hunt” ballet, a Mickey Spillane parody that comes almost at the end of the film.

The Perils of Resistance: The Last Sentence and This Life

Pernilla August and Jesper Christensen in The Last Sentence

One of Toronto’s less acknowledged film festivals, the European Union Film Festival, is just wrapping up its tenth edition (it ends today). Somewhat fanciful in nature, it is comprised of entries, one per country, from the 28 countries who comprise the European Union. (Countries that never joined the EU, like Norway and Switzerland, are unrepresented here. Admission is free, though this year patrons are being allowed to book specific films online if they commit to a $10 donation.) But there is no overarching theme in the programming, which can include features, documentaries, even shorts (last year’s UK program) from this year or recent years. Nevertheless, as in most film festivals, themes can be found. The two Scandinavian movies I checked out, Jan Troell’s The Last Sentence and Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis’s This Life, hailing from Norway’s neighbors, Sweden and Denmark, respectively, both deal with resistance against the Nazis and tell little-known stories about genuine heroes. But only one of them attains the level of art.

The Heart of Darkness in the Novels of Louise Penny

Louise Penny has legions of fans. I once saw a packed house at the Toronto Reference Library enthusiastically waving the latest installment of her Inspector Gamache series in the air so that Penny could photograph the crowd and send it to her publisher. However, I have met a few naysayers who believe her fictional creation of the bucolic rural hamlet of Three Pines in the Quebec Eastern townships, populated by eccentric but kind-hearted residents, iqs too cozy and tidy a la the television series, Morris, Lewis, or PD James’ Inspector Dalgliesh. They contend that Penny’s novels are not sufficiently gritty or cynical in the manner of the television series, Prime Suspect, with Jane Tennison not only under pressure to solve serial murders but forced to contend with sexist hostility from her male underlings, the Ian Rankin novels featuring the anti-social John Rebus, or Michael Connelly’s loner Harry Bosch surrounded by police maleficence or incompetence. In his 2013 Globe and Mail review of the CBC’s production of Still Life, John Doyle dismissed not only the program as “bland” (in which he is spot-on) but Penny’s work as “entertaining yet lacking in complexity and genuine darkness.” He speaks for those who believe that the cerebral but compassionate Armand Gamache, the chief inspector of homicide for the Quebec Sûreté, is too sympathetic or heroic and not as complex and flawed as his counterparts mentioned above. I see their point. But if her critics were to look to the edges of the mystery and the red thread that flows throughout all of the novels, they would recognize the emotional depth and that darkness does envelop – or at least threatens – the tranquil village and especially the province of Quebec where police corruption (a term that seems too mild) is deeply entrenched. 

Meditations on Love and Death: L'Enfer (2005), Autumn in New York (2000) and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005)

Karin Viard, Marie Gillain and Emmanuelle Béart in L'Enfer

Danis Tanović's Oscar-winning debut, No Man's Land (2001), drew most of its intrigue from the comic dilemma of two men – a Bosnian and a Serb – reluctantly sharing a trench in a time of war. L'Enfer (2005) is a densely absorbing thriller where three women reluctantly share a spiritual trench in a completely different kind of war. Based on Krysztof Piesiewicz's screenplay, which was originally conceived for the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and loosely inspired by the second part of Dante's Inferno, L'Enfer is about the kind of erotic unhappiness that burns. Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart) is a married woman who comes to believe that her photographer husband is having an affair with one of his clients. Anne (Marie Gillain) is a young student who is obsessed with one of her professors, a married man who has just split up with his wife. Celine (Karin Viard) is a spinster caring for her invalid mother who begins receiving strange advances made to her by a young man (Guillaume Canet) she meets in a bar.

Transforming Tradition: Bill Clifton's Red Shadows

One of the best parts about listening to music is discovering something new and finding out it was created a generation ago. So it is for Toronto-born pianist, composer and arranger, Bill Clifton. Clifton is not a household name or even a recognized name in the mainstream jazz, but his story and his life in music is one of the most interesting I’ve ever come across, thanks to his second cousin, Michael.

Bill Clifton was born in Toronto in 1917. He grew up in house filled with music entering the Royal Conservatory to study piano at age seven. In high school he was exposed to the sounds of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, early bandleaders looking to advance jazz in clever arrangements that were accessible to a wide audience. Those big band sounds that went beyond the commercial pop songs of the day inspired Clifton to focus on jazz piano and the study of harmony. By 1939 he got a job with one of the pre-eminent bands of the day, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Years earlier, Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin to write “Rhapsody in Blue” for piano and orchestra, so this was definitely a great start to a career in music. Once established in New York City, Clifton became the session player for Whiteman but also put in quality time with Benny Goodman, Bud Freeman and others, including radio work with Bing Crosby at CBS. He also played piano at NBC radio as part of the house band, so times were pretty good well into the 1940s.

Sleuths: Peter Robinson's Abattoir Blues, John Sandford's Deadline and Deborah Crombie's To Dwell In Darkness

One of the things I like best about Peter Robinson’s Yorkshire-based series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is its terrific ensemble cast, especially the ambitious and troubled DI Annie Cabbot (Banks’s on-again, off-again lover) and tall, beautiful Jamaican immigrant DS Winsome Jackman. Even such relatively minor regular characters as DCs Dougal Wilson and Gerry Masterson, Area Commander Catherine Gervaise, and London DCS Richard (Dirty Dick) Burgess – not to mention the various bad guys, witnesses and victims – are well drawn and utterly believable. As Abattoir Blues opens, army veteran Terry Gilchrist’s dog apparently discovers a large bloodstain – and what appears to be brain matter – in the hangar of a long-abandoned airfield. Meanwhile, Cabbot and Wilson are investigating the case of a stolen tractor, which Cabbot maintains is no job for the Homicide and Major Crimes unit. But as Wilson points out, the new police commissioner thinks rural crime is major. Also, it is a very expensive tractor. As those two get on with their investigation, Jackman heads for the hangar to check out the bloodstain. Cabbot and Wilson end up seeking two young men who may be connected to the tractor-theft, and who are now missing. Jackman and Banks’s inquiries soon cross paths with Cabbot and Wilson’s, especially when a horrible truck accident during a sudden snowstorm produces a particularly grisly discovery. The investigation takes Banks and his team all over the countryside, but also into the worlds of high finance, hobby farming, meat rendering, smuggling, property development and, as unlikely as it sounds, spelunking. And while all that is going on, we see some serious interest developing between Winsome and former soldier Gilchrist. Keep an eye on them in future novels.

No Such Thing As Stupid Questions: What If? by Randall Munroe

“Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind. The publisher and author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting, directly or indirectly, from information contained in this book.”

– Disclaimer, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

What if everyone on earth jumped up and down at exactly the same time? No, seriously – what would really happen? What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at nearly the speed of light? What if you tried to build a periodic table of the elements out of the actual elements comprising it? I don’t know. Of course I don’t know. But I know who you can ask.

Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist and now full-time self-employed internet cartoonist, spends a great deal of time putting his well-honed scientific mind to work on the What If blog section of his wildly popular site, xkcd.com, where users submit strange hypothetical questions that he does his best to answer as scientifically as possible. Munroe has kept this blog active for so long that he has now collected enough material to fill a book – one that proves both insightful and hilarious to read.

The Old Man and the Old Moon: Small-Time Charmer

Matt Nuernberger, Dan Weschler, Ryan Melia, Curtis Gillen in The PigPen Theatre Co.'s The Old Man and the Old Moon

The PigPen Theatre Co. has been touring around its musical fairy tale, The Old Man and the Old Moon; I missed it at Williamstown last summer but caught up with it in the ArtsEmerson series in Boston. PigPen consists of seven men who got together as freshmen drama students at Carnegie Mellon in 2007, which makes them around twenty-five. And indeed the spirit of the piece, which they devised in collaboration with their director, Stuart Carden, is undergraduate in the best sense: it feels freshly minted, and it’s devoid of even the smallest taint of cynicism or smugness.

The narrative is a shaggy-dog fable about how the phases of the moon evolved. An old man (Ryan Melia) is tasked with filling up the moon every night with liquid light. Then one day his wife (Alex Falberg), stirred by a familiar piece of music she hears on the wind, sails off to follow it, and the old man, distraught, abandons his post to try to find her. He has a series of adventures on the way:  he gets a ride on a war ship and replaces its captain when he’s killed in battle, he gets swallowed up by an enormous fish, and so on. Meanwhile the moon wanes and finally fades out entirely; the nighttime sky is sunk in darkness, there’s nothing to control the tides, and chaos ensues.

A Very Human Princess: Louise J. Wilkinson's Eleanor de Montfort

My first entrée to the adult section of the public library where I grew up was Queen Elizabeth I. I don't remember how I first encountered Good Queen Bess – doubtless it was some reference in another book, probably a novel. But when I grew frustrated with the books available in the children's section (a brightly lit annex attached to the main building full of primary colors), most of which featured cartoon illustrations of the Spanish Armada, the kindly library suggested (somewhat doubtfully) that I should check the grown-up books. I still remember climbing the staircase that connected the children's annex with the main library – I had to climb the carpeted steps, past the posters for Laura Bush's literacy campaign, to get to the marble and wood chamber of treasures. The big-people librarian wouldn't give me an adult card (I was ten or eleven, and the circulation desk came up to my nose) but my mother arranged for me to have access on my children's card. It was a small library – to get to the non-fiction and history you went up a circular staircase to a balcony with carved wood railings that circled the entire room. I still remember where the Elizabeth books were – right across from the entrance, on a top shelf that I needed a footstool to reach. And there I plopped my small self to read about Elizabeth, her tragic mother Anne Boleyn, her insane sister Mary and the treacheries of her cousin, Jane Gray.

Eventually I burned out on the Tudors, and somehow – probably at the suggestion of the librarians, bless their souls – I moved on to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Elizabeth I is an easy hero for a young girl. After all, she was a Queen in her own right! Eleanor of Aquitaine was slightly more complicated. She also exercised power in her own right, but often had to use the sort of 'soft power' available to women in the medieval period. I still love both Elizabeth and Eleanor, but I have learned in the intervening twenty years how unusual they both were. Most women in the pre-Modern period didn't wield great international influence, or even much autonomous domestic influence. But that doesn't mean that they were not important and influential in both international and domestic spheres. As Louise J. Wilkinson demonstrates in Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (2012) powerful women abound. But unlike Elizabeth I and Eleanor of Aquitaine, it takes dedication to learn about these influential, flawed, and fascinating women  of the Middle Ages. This is certainly the case for Eleanor de Montfort, granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and an absolutely spectacular character in her own right.