'Lion in Winter' roars on with a new life

This time, Glenn Close and Patrick Stewart are taking over the lead roles.
By JOANNE WEINTRAUB
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
For stage-trained actors of a certain age, doing "The Lion in Winter" must be something like climbing Mount Everest: The peak's been scaled before, but others still itch to get up there and plant their own flag.
So you can't blame Glenn Close and Patrick Stewart for wanting to go where Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole went brilliantly in the 1968 film version. And if the feat doesn't seem quite as astounding this time around, it's still an impressive one.
Producer Robert Halmi Sr. and director Andrei Konchalovsky, whose previous collaboration was NBC's handsome "The Odyssey" in 1997, lead their expedition up the same path O'Toole and Hepburn took in the movie, hardly altering the late James Goldman's Oscar-winning screenplay a bit.
And why would they? The script, based on Goldman's Broadway play, is like something Shakespeare would have written if he'd lived long enough to meet Noel Coward and Edward Albee.
It also boasts some of the least realistic lines of 12th-century dialogue ever penned, including the Christmas greeting: "Well, what shall we hang, the holly or each other?" Then again, realism is probably overrated.
What it's about
The Yuletide at hand is 1183. In the spirit of the holiday, Britain's King Henry II (Stewart) has generously allowed his wife of many years, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Close), a furlough from prison, where he's had her locked up for a decade for conspiring against him.
Feeling a bit like King Lear, as he tells his young mistress, Alais (Julia Vysotsky), the aging Henry has decided it's time to gather his three sons together and hand over the empire to one of them, lest the family lose it all to Alais' viperish brother, King Philip II of France (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).
Henry favors the dull, somewhat dopey John (Rafe Spall) over the hot-headed Richard (Andrew Howard) and the scheming Geoffrey (John Light). But Eleanor has other ideas -- and when it comes to scheming, she could have taught Machiavelli a thing or three.
The Christmas gifts exchanged by this unusual clan include threats, lies, flattery, bribes, coldblooded manipulation, emotional blackmail and betrayals of a sexual, filial and political nature. Some of these people actually harbor affection for each other, too, which just makes everything more complicated.
With the exception of the pure-hearted Alais and the hopeless John, whose idea of witty repartee is "You stink, you stinker!" all the characters have rapiers for tongues. Philip, being French, has poison on the tip of his.
Roles, big and small
The supporting cast is a capable but not distinguished one. The only real disappointment is Rhys-Meyers, whose Philip isn't nearly as elegantly evil as Timothy Dalton's of 36 years before.
But the enterprise would fall apart without a leonine Henry and an equally majestic Eleanor, and the Showtime version has both.
Stewart captures Henry's wit, his impatience, his foolishness and pride.
If his performance isn't quite as regal as O'Toole's, it's because Stewart relies a bit too much on charm, where his predecessor was unafraid to be as brutal as a man who'd jail his wife and set his sons against one another must have been.
Close, on the other hand, gives an even richer, more nuanced portrayal of Eleanor than Hepburn's.
The great Kate was already a legend when she played the part, and her performance, while hugely enjoyable, is mannered. Close's is more human, more vulnerable, more surprising.
Konchalovsky's staging of this essentially stagy material hews closely to film director Anthony Harvey's, which is to say it's grand but hardly original.
Even the handling of the sexual tension between Richard and Philip, which looks boldly contemporary, is in fact very similar to the older version's.
I only know this, of course, because it's so easy to rent the 1968 "Lion in Winter." Whether the world needed a 2004 model, I can't quite decide.