The Abject Pathos of Olivia Colman

The actress' powerful performance in HBO's "Landscapers" demonstrates her unique ability to imbue even morally ambiguous characters with empathy.

When I first heard that Olivia Colman was going to be taking over the role of Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s hit series The Crown, I scratched my head a bit. Though I’d certainly heard of her, I’d never really seen her in anything, and so I was a bit hesitant to believe that she could capture the essence of the queen to the same extent as Claire Foy had managed to do in her two-season stint on the show. 

Then I saw The Favourite. 

Colman’s performance as Queen Anne immediately transfixed me. She was imperious and demanding and delightfully, exquisitely abject, a woman who yearned for affection and dominated the women committed to serving her. Even as her body failed around her, and even though she could be truly awful to her favorites, somehow Colman managed to imbue this character with a profound pathos that allowed us as viewers to feel with her, to experience the anguish of a middle-aged monarch slipping into obsolescence, denied even the comfort of her children, all of whom had predeceased her. 

Though Colman’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II is less straightforwardly frumpy than her Queen Anne, her character still feels the pinch of age. As she gazes at the new profiles for stamps, she remarks on the way that her body has aged, saying: “age is rarely kind to anyone.” While Elizabeth goes on to remark, in her typical, stoic fashion, that there’s nothing to be done but get on with it, it’s very clear that seeing her younger and “old bat” selves juxtaposed has brought home to her in no uncertain terms how much she has changed. And, once again, it’s hard not to feel at least a glimmer of sympathy for this woman who, throughout the third season, comes to believe that both she and the country over which she rules have begun a slide into decrepitude.

There is, then, something unique about Colman’s ability to wring pathos from the realm of the abject. Like other stars of a certain age–I’m thinking in particular here of Jessica Lange, who has made playing abject women a staple of her later career, from Big Edie of Grey Gardens to her four-season stint on American Horror Story–Colman isn’t afraid to look and act a little frumpy in order to fully convey the abject nature of the women that she plays. Eschewing glamor, she really does work to inhabit these women and, as a result, she allows them, even tyrants like Queen Anne, to become legible and empathetic.

Which brings us to Landscapers, the new black comedy/drama from HBO, focusing on real-life convicted murders Susan and Chrisopher Edwards (the latter of whom is played by David Thewlis, yet another British actor not afraid of looking ugly in a role. See also: the third season of FX’s Fargo). Colman’s Susan is a study in contradictions: capable of searing emotional outbursts yet deeply in love with Christopher and reliant on him to provide an anchor to the real world, a seemingly fragile survivor of sexual abuse who, nevertheless, had the strength to shoot her mother (if her story is to be believed). 

Throughout the series’ four-episode run, Colman’s performance sheds light on Susan’s complex psychology. As a passionate devotee of classic Hollywood, Susan frequently indulges in flights of fancy, interpolating herself into the sorts of scenarios familiar to anyone who knows old westerns. Indeed, the entire fourth episode is split between, on the one hand, the black-and-white cinematography of the courtroom (the “real” world) and the crisp and colorful scenario playing out in Susan’s head (the “dream” world). In the latter, Susan has more agency than she ever has in her actual life and, as the episode draws to a close, she gallops away with Chris, like two fictional heroes riding off into the sunset. 

In less-capable hands, Susan would become nothing more than a delusional madwoman, or perhaps even the calculating, homicidal monster the police and prosecution make her out to be. However, time and again Colman’s performance reveals her as something quite different. We see, for example, her transition from being a starry-eyed young woman in love with French cinema and entranced by Christohper to weather-beaten frump living in exile in France. Colman’s face, with its unique mobility; her voice, with its mousy, faintly simpering intonation; and her clothes, all loose-fighting blouses in bland colors, combine to give Susan a sort of abject pathos that makes us identify with her, even if we can’t quite decide whether her description of her parents’ deaths is the true one. 

At times she is, as her husband describes her, a fragile woman seemingly incapable of dealing with the realities of the world, as when she persists in buying Hollywood memorabilia that they can’t afford. At others, she’s surprisingly cunning, and she maintains a long-running correspondence with Chris, pretending that she is famed French actor Gérard Depardieu. She even goes to exacting lengths to ensure that he doesn’t catch on to the ruse, including erasing the postmarks. 

All of which makes the central question–did she murder her parents in cold blood for financial gain, or did she shoot her mother only after she had, in turn, shot her father?–all the more engimatic and impossible to solve. The genius of Colman’s screen presence is such that, whatever the prosecution and the police might think, and whatever the eventual verdict might suggest (they were both found guilty and sentenced to at least 25 years for the double murder), we can’t quite bring ourselves to believe that this abject woman was capable of such a cold-blooded act of cruelty. It is, on the other hand, very easy to believe that she was the survivor of sexual abuse at her father’s hands and emotional at her mothers, the latter of whom repeatedly tells her that she’s unlovable, a mentality that Susan seems to have internalized and that renders her reliance on Chris all the more believable and heart-wrenching.

When, therefore, she rides off into the sunset at the end of the final episode, it’s hard not to feel as if, at last, she has managed to wrench back some of the happiness and joy that a deeply and abjectly unhappy childhood and adolescence have stolen from her. Yes, her body might have begun to sag and her hair to turn grey and yes, her face shows the signs of their poverty while living in France, away from their old lives, but dammit, she’s going to have her last little fantasy. The future might be even more full of the abject—how else can one describe a quarter-century spent in prison?—but, for Colman’s Susan, she’s always have her fantasy.