McNamara writes the rudest lines in period drama and gives them to women who want more than their century allows. Over two hours it is a real pleasure; over ten the trick wears thin, and the films are at their best when Lanthimos keeps them cold.
Fi1m perspective
Early in the first episode of The Great (2020), Catherine, newly arrived in Russia with a head full of philosophers, presents her husband with a twig. Peter, who greeted her with a bear, looks at it in honest confusion. That is the McNamara method in one exchange: a woman who has read too much offers something sincere to a man who has not, and both talk as if it were last Tuesday. He puts the modern sentence in the old room and lets the gap between the wig and the words make the joke. We laughed, loudly, because the confusion is real and nobody is winking.
He came to this late. Twenty-five years of Australian theatre and television preceded it, along with two features he directed himself, The Rage in Placid Lake (2003) and Ashby (2015). The turn was The Favourite (2018), co-written with Deborah Davis for Yorgos Lanthimos, and everything since has been a variation on it: The Great, built from his own play and running to 2023; Cruella (2021) with Emma Stone; Poor Things (2023), again for Lanthimos and again with Stone. He has said he did not want to be "yoked to details of history that didn’t help tell her story, and were anti drama", and that is the licence he writes under.
What he does well is give malice a conversational ease, so a scene about power sounds like a scene about attention: who has Queen Anne’s, who is about to lose it. In The Favourite he and Davis keep the manoeuvring close to the business of being noticed, and the actors find embarrassment and need under the rude words. Lanthimos helps. His cold frames stop the lines from being merely quotable, and The Favourite is the one time the writer’s warmth and the director’s chill sit in balance.
The weakness is repetition, and it grows with the running time. In The Favourite a few exchanges are another round of a contest we already understand. Poor Things runs out of new things to say about Bella a good half hour before it stops, and it wants so badly to be liked that jokes land and then hold for a beat to check we got them. Given thirty hours for The Great, the one great trick is doing the plot’s work by the sixth episode of any season; the coup advances an inch and retreats an inch. The violence is filmed as a punchline and lands as one perhaps half the time. The other half, when somebody was shot for sport and the show asked us to laugh, we felt slightly grubby, and we do not think that was the intention.
The Roses (2025) is next. Watch it, two hours at a time, and hope the director in the room is one who does not laugh at the jokes.
Biography
Tony McNamara is an Australian playwright, screenwriter and television producer. Born in Kilmore, Victoria, he studied writing at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and screenwriting at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
After writing stage plays and television episodes, he made his feature directorial debut with The Rage in Placid Lake (2003). He is known for co-writing the screenplay for The Favourite (2018) with Yorgos Lanthimos and for writing the screenplay for Poor Things (2023), also directed by Lanthimos. He created the comedy-drama series The Great (2020–2023).
McNamara has also written the screenplay for Cruella (2021) and directed Ashby (2015). He received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for The Favourite and Best Adapted Screenplay for Poor Things.
