Couch Cinema: 'The Great'
by
Margot Harrison
on
July 21, 2020 at 8:00AM
The palace serfs, who presumably have to clean up all that broken glass, are treated like subhumans; during an outbreak of smallpox, the nobles blithely burn their infected servants alive. Pleading for vaccination, Catherine is the viewer’s surrogate and the voice of modernity and reason, yet she’s also painfully naïve — a sheltered kid trying to rebuild a country.