The movie was excellent drama, and I enjoyed the diverse casting too. (It's been common in theatre, which is the director's background.) Both actresses were great, and Margot Robbie really did commit to playing Queen Elizabeth as she aged and hardened. I did sometimes miss dialogue due to whispering or accents, but I was able to keep straight most of the various characters even though I've forgotten a lot of British history. There's the usual complaints about historical accuracy, but I'm fine with dramatic license and simplification of complex issues about the Reformation so that we can concentrate on the royals as people.
Yes there is a feminist viewpoint on the political machinations, with the men often plotting around the queens and derisively talking about women's "whims" and "passions" that supposedly make them unfit to rule. Particularly egregious is John Knox, who doesn't care about Mary's religious tolerance for Protestants in Scotland, and keeps denouncing her as a papist and a sinful woman who does not deserve power. He gets more misogynistic as time wears on, calling her a harlot and murderer who needs to be overthrown.
From the moment Mary returns to Scotland from France, men start jockeying for power and wondering if she'll remarry after being widowed so young. Her half-brother James, the Earl of Moray resents that Mary won't listen to his advice so he starts plotting with various factions to try to wrest the throne away from her and reinstate himself in power. (The movie depicts him as working together with John Knox to raise an army, though I read somewhere that they actually opposed each other on the issue of Mary keeping a private Catholic mass for herself even after it was banned in the protestant Kirk.)
At first, Elizabeth does join in on the machinations, commanding her favourite Robert Dudley to woo her cousin Mary. Dudley wants to stay faithful to Elizabeth, but she says, "If you marry her, we would control her," assuming always that the husband rules the wife despite their unequal status. Dudley reluctantly goes to Scotland, but to his relief, Mary is cool to him as a suitor and more focused on demanding that Elizabeth name her successor. When Elizabeth suffers from smallpox and is left scarred for life, she becomes insecure about Dudley's love for her, and he reassures her that he remains hers always. So Elizabeth no longer wants him to marry Mary, and fortunately for them, Lord Darnley goes to Scotland for a successful courtship instead. Elizabeth's advisers object to Darnley for his own hereditary claims to the English throne, but Elizabeth says that Mary is technically abiding by the request to marry an Englishman, and she is inclined to let the marriage happen.
Although Elizabeth allows William Cecil at one point to secretly send English troops to aid a civil war in Scotland, Mary's army defeats the rebellion and she mercifully (but unwisely) spares her brother's life, hoping to reconcile with him. Pretending to be penitent, James then manipulates Mary's new husband to help him usurp power, but Mary successfully outmaneuvers them and escapes back to her loyal army at Bothwell's. That strength forces the treasonous bastards to back down and beg to be pardoned for murdering David Rizzio. Mary even uses Darnley's part in the conspiracy to separate from him and cut the alcoholic bastard out of their son's life.
From afar, Elizabeth is rather impressed by Mary's resilience, so she won't agree to send another army to Scotland, and for a large part of the movie she becomes apathetic about Scotland's power struggles. The film depicts her as envious of Mary's motherhood and regretful of her own choice to never marry. She still doesn't marry, of course, due to her fears that her husband would try to rule over her or conspire for her throne the way that Darnley did with Mary, but Elizabeth seems to privately long for what she can't have and imagines herself in Mary's place. Thus she fades somewhat from the plot while men in Scotland continue to plot against Mary.
Mary's advisers want her to divorce Darnley and marry a Scottish protestant, but she won't, due to her Catholicism; she also says she doesn't want to become a female Henry VIII, tossing spouses aside. Not satisfied with this, the treasonous factions recruit Mary's previously loyal Lord Bothwell to their side, and they murder Darnley. Separating Mary from her son, Bothwell then reveals his treachery by forcing Mary to marry him. Mary's brother then tries to make her abdicate, and stupid Bothwell whines, "You said I would be King" much like the arrogant Darnley had wanted to be King, not a mere consort to Mary. These power-hungry men, stealing her throne, her agency, and even her child from her.
Mary is vulnerable and desperate when she flees to England and asks for Elizabeth's help. It's a fictional meeting, but necessary for the film's climax. The secret meeting shows Elizabeth's conflicted feelings about her cousin. She willingly offers protection to Mary, but she won't agree to send an army to help Mary take back Scotland. As a protestant Queen, she can't aid a Catholic to take back a neighboring throne; her council are upset enough about Elizabeth still having no heir. (Wiki says that in real life Elizabeth tried to negotiate to restore Mary to the throne in exchange for a guarantee of Protestantism in Scotland, but a convention in Perth rejected it.) In the movie, the women argue about what they owe each other as fellow queens. Elizabeth confesses that she long admired and envied her cousin, but she now realizes that Mary's ambition and unwillingness to back down is also going to be her downfall. She can't succeed in retaking power. Elizabeth storms out and orders that Mary be imprisoned.
The movie then skips ahead to Mary's execution (though they don't age the actress's appearance at all). We don't actually see the nearly 19 years that Mary is imprisoned, nor the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and make England Catholic again. Sure the Reformation struggles are important historically, but the film skips that and goes straight to the execution for its more personal story about the two queens. I think the film should have aged Mary just like they aged Elizabeth, to be realistic and equal, but apparently they wanted to keep her idealized and young, despite the confusion this creates about the time jump.
Anyway, we hear an internal monologue from Elizabeth, saying what she wishes she could say to Mary about her regrets that they couldn't be allies, that neither of them could wholly escape their male advisors plotting against them, and forcing them to do what they did not want. (Elizabeth had earlier told William Cecil that she had to become more man than woman to rule.) So Mary dies in martyr red, though we are spared the gruesomeness of her execution; instead we envision her son James, the future ruler of both England and Scotland after both queens are dead. Mary's own internal monologue to her son hopefully implies there will be peace then, though of course historically, the English Civil War would endanger the monarchy again in the 1650s. But that's the problem with monarchy, mixing personal drama with state problems of religion and governmental policy. Still, the movie is an affecting, powerful tragedy.
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