Firebrand Struggles to Give Meaning to Katherine Parr’s Story

Hundreds of years later, our pop culture is still fascinated by England’s King Henry VIII, his six wives and the Tudor period in general. From prestige television series like The Spanish Princess, Becoming Elizabeth and Wolf Hall to the hit Broadway musical Six, we’re still captivated by the quiet fortitude of Catherine of Aragon, the boundary-pushing fire of Anne Boleyn, the untimely death of Jane Seymour, the unfortunate humiliation of Anne of Cleves and the teenage indiscretions of Catherine Howard. Yet Henry’s final wife, Katherine Parr, is often given particularly short shrift in our collective historical consciousness, seemingly only remembered as remarkable because she’s the woman who managed to outlive a monstrous man. This isn’t the whole story—the real Katherine was accomplished, educated and outspoken about matters of religion—but you might not know that if all you have to go on is Firebrand, a movie that often treats its central character as poorly as history does.

The English-language debut from Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz, Firebrand is marketed as a film that finally gives Queen Katherine her due. Aïnouz himself initially described the movie as the “undiscovered story” of a woman who was “under-represented in English history”, and its trailer certainly frames her as a fiery upstart who’s more than Henry’s equal.

But while it certainly looks great—lush and lived-in, with sumptuous costumes, richly appointed sets, and a general aesthetic that feels like nothing so much as a painting by one of the Dutch masters—Firebrand is weirdly uninterested in the queen’s inner life for a story that’s meant to be about her. Katherine (Alicia Vikander) remains remarkably opaque for most of the film. Her motivations and feelings are largely a mystery, her strident faith is barely touched upon and you likely won’t walk out of the theater knowing much more about her than you did before. (Spoiler alert: She survives.) Like so many other Tudor-focused stories, Firebrand can’t tear its eyes from the mad king at its center to see the exceptional queen standing beside him.

Firebrand begins promisingly enough, with King Henry VII (Jude Law) away at war in France, and Katherine serving as regent during his absence. Thoughtful and deliberate, she’s raising her motherless stepchildren, becoming the first woman in English history to publish a book of religious devotions under her own name, and quietly supporting the ministry of her childhood friend Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a Protestant activist with radical ideas about letting the English populace encounter God for themselves.

But despite its initial focus on the queen’s reformist tendencies, the film offers little depth or context to her beliefs. In fact, it struggles to explain what any of her views actually are until perilously close to its end. Viewers who come into the movie with scant knowledge of the tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the wake of Henry’s decision to break with Rome and crown himself head of the Church of England upon his marriage to Anne Boleyn will struggle to understand why Katherine’s religious opinions are so radical. After all, England is Protestant now, isn’t it? They may also miss how access to a Bible written in a commonly spoken language would be so revolutionary for the English populace. (If the common people came to believe they didn’t need a religious authority to interpret God’s word for them, what other kinds of authority might they decide they no longer require?)

But once Henry returns early from the battlefield, Katherine immediately takes a backseat to her overbearing husband, and the film becomes more of a domestic thriller than a nuanced exploration of a woman who was largely ahead of her time.

To be fair, Vikander does much with the little she’s given, and most of the depth granted Katherine comes from her endlessly expressive demeanor and body language. Hyper-aware of the fates that have met the five wives who have come before her, her existence is largely a performative one, enduring her husband’s pawing attempts at sex, overt ogling of other ladies and public bullying with an ironclad self-possession. There are a few moments where the obvious rage Katherine constantly carries surges to the fore, only to be quickly smothered in favor of the simpering apologies of survival.

Frequent scenes of abuse and violence illustrate how precarious her position is, even as Queen of England, and Firebrand is at its best when it allows us to see the ways she must deliberately stifle herself, sublimating her own moral urgency about the faith (and fate) of her country in the face of more immediate mortal danger. These are also the moments when the film feels most overtly feminist, and its messages about the ways Katherine and women like her must purposefully make themselves lesser in order to survive are powerful. But, Katherine is given little agency of her own, spending most of her time simply reacting to the mercurial moods of her husband.

Firebrand is as much a story about Henry’s last decline as it is about his final queen’s remarkable survival. To its credit, the movie doesn’t shy away from depicting his worst qualities, gleefully showing us the king at his most repulsive and grotesque. His once-famous physique has deteriorated. His body seems to be constantly oozing something. His overwhelming paranoia colors every scene with a palpable sense of menace. Law, who has fully embraced his weirdo character actor era, throws himself into the role with admirable gusto, smirking, roaring, overindulging, whining and stealing every scene he’s in. He’s tremendous—chilling, utterly impossible to look away from—and, through no fault of Law’s, constantly upstaging his scene partner, overshadowing the very woman this movie is supposed to be about.

Even the title ends up feeling like a bait and switch. We rarely get the chance to see any evidence of Katherine’s spirit, save for a bold, last-minute and utterly ahistorical swerve that belongs in a much more interesting movie. And her supposed long-lasting effect on England isn’t framed through her religious fervor or personal intelligence, but her influence on the queen who will one day come after her. Yes, in many ways Firebrand is a Queen Elizabeth I prequel in disguise, and the film is very deliberately framed and narrated by the young princess (Junia Rees), rather than Katherine herself.

Disgusted by her father and repulsed by the treatment her stepmother receives at his hands, the future Virgin Queen is ultimately formed through this movie’s crucible; it is the source of both her sense of self-worth and her ultimate refusal to place her future under the control of a husband. Granted, the #girlboss vibes are not particularly subtle, but the film finds its strongest voice in granting the princess the agency and inner fire it often withholds from her stepmother. (The final shot of Elizabeth is a straight banger.) Unfortunately, in doing so, it also once again makes Katherine Parr a footnote in the story of a Tudor, and just because we happen to like this one a lot more than we do her father doesn’t make it more palatable to those of us looking for a more compelling take on Parr’s life. She survives, as she always has, but as an attempt to rescue a remarkable woman from the footnotes of history, Firebrand falls flat.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB

Tudor Drama Firebrand Struggles to Give Meaning to Katherine Parr’s Story