For some, “Dame Helen Mirren playing the Catherine the Great” is all the convincing they’ll need to watch this new biographical limited series, which is perfectly understandable. …
playing the Catherine the Great” is all the convincing they’ll need to watch this new biographical limited series, which is perfectly understandable. The casting of Mirren in the role, which follows the Russian empress in the embattled latter years of her life, is a smart choice that proves its worth every time she’s onscreen.
And yet: stepping back from the series’ four episodes reveals a disappointing lack of ambition in portraying such a titanic force’s final days. For as fascinating as Catherine and her life at court was, “Catherine the Great” largely chooses to sidestep the ins and outs of her atypically liberal politics and the wars fought in her name to focus on her romance with Grigory Potemkin , a charismatic and restless soldier.
Her dynamic with Potemkin is interesting at first, especially as she tries to toy with his emotions while he reluctantly hangs suspended between Catherine and Praskovya. But despite Clarke and Mirren’s commitment to selling every tortured glance and impassioned outcry between them, neither Williams’ scripts nor Philip Martin’s directing manage to sell the depth of their apparent love for each other.
Meanwhile, tantalizing morsels of history nip around the edges of the story, only to get batted away by Catherine’s longing for Potemkin to return home. Not even a Crimean takeover or Catherine’s aborted quest to end slavery — fascinating chapters of her life that fed into so much controversy and anger towards the end of her reign — can overshadow her self-professed “obsession” with love, apparently. It’s not that exploring the way Catherine lived and loved couldn’t be interesting.
But again: for those wanting to see Mirren sweep through the majestic halls of a Russian palace, imperious and amorous and uncompromising, “Catherine the Great” will deliver the goods. There are worse things than tuning in for that alone, but then again, there are certainly better.
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