I had high hopes for this! A four-episode HBO miniseries in which a 74-year-old Helen Mirren playing the famously promiscuous last Empress of Russia? That's an interesting set-up! Instead of focusing on Catherine's tumultuous rise to power and rivalry with her husband, let's take a look at the final years of the woman who was by that point maybe the most powerful woman in the world. Is she bored, with nothing left to conquer? Is she vengeful? Is she quietly satisfied? These lovers that she takes, who are forty years her junior - what's that whole dynamic like?
But the miniseries very emphatically was not interested in doing any of this! The series begins when Catherine is just 35 years old with minimal effort made to de-age Helen Mirren and, I mean, I'm sorry, but not even Helen Mirren can pull off "35 in the 1700s" at 74. And from there it's a fairly by-the-numbers retelling, in four episodes, of what the Russian Empire accomplished under Catherine's rule. The show doesn't shy away from the fact that she took multiple different lovers throughout her lifetime, but it also doesn't bother exploring this with any depth or substance. And it's also never really clear what makes Catherine tick, or who she is, or what she wants. Is she progressive? Is she an authoritarian tyrant? Are we meant to be rooting for her as a human being, or observing her as a case study of absolute power? All these questions go unanswered. The final episode has some great melodrama that Mirren dials up to eleven like the champ she is, but for the most part the role feels weirdly miscast.
There's one scene in particular that stands out to me as emblematic of the whole production's overall disinterest in saying anything. At the end of the third episode, Catherine finally arrives, on a ship, to the Black Sea; she has finally conquered Crimea - more specifically, her lover Potemkin has - and the Russian Empire has a warm-weather port from which to become a great naval power. This is ostensibly what she has been striving for throughout her entire reign, and Potemkin leads her up to the deck and says, "behold," and gestures vaguely toward an entire armada. That's quite a gift! Sensing the gravity of the moment, Potemkin vows he's done all this for her, would do anything for her, and loves her, before falling to his knees in front of her to abase himself at her robe hems. (She was fucking some other guy like two minutes ago, for what it's worth.)
This is the end of the episode! The music has reached a dramatic crescendo, the armada is all firing cannons, Potemkin clearly knows this is a hashtag-moment, and what's Mirren doing? Nothing! She just stands there, taking it all in, expressionless, but not like, meaningfully expressionless. It's not overwhelmed and it's not bored. There's no satisfied grin. Her eyes don't close as she leans her head back and inhales deeply. But there's also no "oh shit, what have we done?" deer-in-the-headlights look. Did she want his? Does she appreciate this? Does having a powerful man groveling at her feet amuse or excite her in any way? Or maybe, does it disgust her? The show doesn't know! Despite the show very clearly recognizing the bombast of this moment, it opts to let Mirren's Catherine not really react to it in any way! And so the very titular character remains a complete enigma even here at the height of her reign. It's not clear if this is on the director or the writers or Mirren herself - the scene is very clearly green-screened and CGIed, so, who knows if Mirren was even told what it was she was supposed to be looking at?
Anyway, they can't all be winners! Oh well. HBO still earns the benefit of the doubt more often than not when it comes to period pieces - shit, look at Chernobyl just earlier this year - and I'm sure I'll be back for whatever historical biopic miniseries they roll out with next.
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