The Great, Reviewed: A Proudly Fictional, Pleasurably Vulgar Spin on Catherine the Great – The New Yorker

With her rosy cheeks, wide eyes, and frothy wardrobe, Elle Fanning, as Catherine, can look absolutely guileless one second and blood-hungry the next.Photograph by Ollie Upton / Hulu

In his 2011 biography of Catherine the Great (born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, in Pomerania, in 1729), the late historian Robert K. Massie writes of her that more than any other monarch of her day, there was always a wide latitude for humor. Perhaps it was Catherines way of soften[ing] imperial presence with a sense of humor and a quick tongue, as Massie puts it, that enabled her to enact one of the greatest coups dtat in monarchical history: in the summer of 1762, eighteen years after arriving in Saint Petersburg as a teen-age bride to the future Peter III, the (allegedly) impotent and ill-tempered Emperor of Russia, she orchestrated a plan to overthrow him and ascend to the throne herself. Peter died just eight days after the coup, likely at an assassins hand, at a palace called Ropsha. Catherine, who ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years, proclaimed that Peters cause of death was hemorrhoidal colic, and then gave Ropsha to her lover, Grigory Orlov, who had helped her devise and execute the scheme. When it came to seizing power, the empress was deadly serious, which made her good-humored affect all the more threatening. She was a voracious readerof Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers, mostlya hobby that sharpened her mind and her tongue. When she arrived on Russian soil, she was a lamb. By the time she took the throne, she was a viper.

The Greata droll, morbid new ten-episode series about Catherine and Peter that started streaming on Hulu last monthdoes not pretend to be historically accurate: the shows title card comes with an asterisk proclaiming it to be an occasionally true story. The series creator, Tony McNamara, plays fast and loose with the biographical facts that were so painstakingly recorded in Massies doorstopper. For the sake of dramatic expediency, the series compresses Catherines sprawling, ruthless ambitions into a compact, jewel-box time frame. The fictional Catherine, played with flinty cunning by Elle Fanning, does not wait almost two decades before staging her revolt. In the first episode, she looks forward to her new life as an empress with a swooning, girlish romanticism, but her outlook begins to darken almost from the moment she attends her first palace feast. Historians tell us that Peter III was a hotheaded man who was rendered unattractive after a battle with smallpox; he had far more passion for military stratagems than for his wifeor any other woman, for that matter. In her memoirs, Catherine succinctly roasted him as an idiot. In The Great, Peter (Nicholas Hoult) retains the idiocy but is also dashing and debonair, a frattish sybarite with a sadists taste for violence and an insatiable sexual appetite. He coldly greets his bride-to-be by saying, You look taller in your portrait, after staring for long seconds at her backside.

Despite its rollicking biographical liberties, The Great does seem to preserve something of Catherines quick, curious manner. With her rosy cheeks, wide eyes, and frothy wardrobe, Fanning can look absolutely guileless one second and blood-hungry the next. By the end of the first episode, Catherine has come to see that the only way to liberate herself from a tyrant is to learn his ways; that to escape her terrible marriage, she must become terrible herself. In this way, The Great pleasingly avoids smearing a shiny feminist gloss over the empresss story. In the fifth episode, titled War and Vomit, Catherine visits the front lines of a Russian battlefield while carrying a Tiffany-blue box full of macarons, in order to pose for an official battle painting. When she offers a cookie to a bloody soldier who says that he cannot take one, because he has lost his fingers, she proceeds to shove a macaron directly into his mouth. Its pistachio, if thats helpful, she says.

McNamara, who wrote the screenplay for The Favourite, from 2018, has distinguished himself with a style of royal satire that provokes moral and physical repulsion in equal measure. That filmstarring Olivia Colman as a petulant, tyrannical Queen Anne, and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone as the ladies-in-waiting warring for her attentionsubverted queenly history by foregrounding Annes battles with gout and ravenous sexual demands. It is suggested that perhaps subsisting on a regular diet of mutton and cream at a time when plumbing technology was not very advanced may have led monarchs to smell like ripe gorgonzola, and to act just as sour. The same nauseating sense of hedonism pervades The Great. The show is ostentatiously vulgar (McNamara peppers the word cunt into nearly every scene, as if it is fine seasoning) and gross (I gasped when the archbishop, having informed Catherine that he must check whether her interior wall has been breached, reaches up to moisten two fingers in his mouth). Excess and violence are horrifically intertwined. In a late episode, Peter, afraid that someone is planning to overthrow him, sets up five torture stations at the palace to try to smoke out the traitor. This looks great! he says to the court doctor, surveying the scene from a balcony. In order to prove that she is no traitor (even though she absolutely is one), Catherine offers to sit at the fingernail-pulling station herself. The ensuing closeup, of Fanning writhing in pain, is enough to turn your stomach, but it also makes a point. Nobody is spared in Peters palace, least of all his flaxen bride.

The show is, despite all this, somehow a comedy, full of vituperative one-liners and thistle-sharp insults. (Women are for seeding, not reading, Peter tells Catherine, early in the show. Later, she reads him a passage by Diderot: Man will never be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.) It is also a visual feast, with lavish set dressings and richly colored costumes. I couldnt help thinking, as I watched, that given the global halt in film production due to the pandemic, The Great may be the last over-the-top period piece to be released this year. There are fatty pheasants and cookie towers, hunting expeditions and ballroom escapades. Hoult prances around in animal pelts, waistcoats, and a comically large cross necklace, looking like a spoiled little boy who raided his mothers fairy box. When Catherine tells him to listen to his people and give them what they want, he snorts, What they want? Its a novel idea. Possibly French? I am a prisoner here, married to an idiot, Catherine says, in a line that echoes the assessment in her memoirs. Like The Favourite, The Great extends great sympathy to its monarch, held captive in a life she did not choose, while also mercilessly skewering her ruthlessness and misplaced largesse. The show may not be historically accurate, but it slices through history like a hot poker, to royaltys rancid core.

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The Great, Reviewed: A Proudly Fictional, Pleasurably Vulgar Spin on Catherine the Great - The New Yorker