“Use all your voices! When I bellow, bellow back!”
So demands Henry II of England (Peter O’Toole), circa 1183, in The Lion in Winter, a movie for which the word bellow might have been invented. O’Toole bellows, Katharine Hepburn bellows, a young Anthony Hopkins bellows—we all bellow for Oscars (and Hepburn got one).
An adaptation of James Goldman’s 1966 play (Goldman also wrote the screenplay), The Lion in Winter takes place over a frigid Christmas in which the cruel, narcissistic Henry, while being needled by his scheming queen Eleanor (Hepburn), teasingly holds the crown before three possible heirs: Richard (Hopkins), an accomplished warrior and Eleanor’s favorite; Geoffrey (John Castle), their cool, calculating middle child; and John (Nigel Terry), Henry’s favorite, but a seeming simpleton. What proceeds are a series of shouting matches over who should hold power and why, a decision complicated by Henry’s young mistress (Jane Merrow) and the arrival of Philip II of France (Timothy Dalton).
O’Toole’s theatricality was a boon to Lawrence of Arabia, where it fit the larger-than-life character and also took place against the vast backdrop of the Arabian desert. Here, while raging in dingy castle chambers, O’Toole’s bluster echoes off the walls, leaving no space for anything else. It’s a performance that could fill a cavernous theater, but doesn’t serve the camera.
The filmmaking is equally declarative, from the script (“I’m father’s favorite,” John whines to his brothers, telling them and us something we clearly already know) to John Barry’s emphatic score to the insistent zooms favored by director Anthony Harvey. The only moments in The Lion in Winter that are allowed to breathe are a handful of landscape shots, which capture the bleak beauty of this time and place.
To be fair, some of the performances work better than O’Toole’s. When he isn’t matching bellow for bellow, Hopkins is slippery and supple, sliding quick little asides in between his larger bursts. When Philip claims, “I’ve spent two years on every street in hell,” Richard responds, almost under his breath, “That’s odd, I never saw you there.”
Perhaps the most fun, if hardly subtle, is Hepburn as Eleanor. Matching O’Toole step for step in Shakespearean grandeur, she also brings a playfulness that threatens to thrust the material into the modern era at any moment. “Of course he has a knife,” she snaps in one tense moment. “We all have knives. It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians.” Then, balancing the comedy, she also delivers a soliloquy to a mirror in praise of her own persistent beauty. It’s a potent piece of meta performance for an actor in the fourth decade of her career. Indeed, The Lion in Winter might be at its most enjoyable when Eleanor squares off against Henry—and Hepburn puts a cork in O’Toole’s bellows.
