Elizabeth, however, proves a complication to this historically flexible feminism. And she does that precisely through the confession she makes—of her own alleged inadequacy—to her fellow queen: your motherhood. Mary Queen of Scots is most immediately a political drama, loosely based on true events; on another level, though—a far more unsettling level—it is a film about pregnancy, and the way the fickle workings of human bodies can bend the course of history. Would either queen marry? Would either bear a child? You could read the film’s abiding interest in those questions as an empathetic exploration of the paradox that both queens, in life, really did navigate: Marry, and potentially gain an heir—but also risk being usurped by your husband; or remain single, avoiding the risk of usurpation … but ensuring the death of your dynasty. The personal is political, rendered in the most intimate, and consequential, of ways.

That reading, though, would be generous. What makes Mary Queen of Scots remarkable, as a specimen of the 21st century, is the moral judgment it layers onto the procreative demands of monarchy. Mary, the historical figure, married and had a child; Elizabeth, the historical figure, did neither. The film takes those blunt facts and finds pliant meaning in them, determining that each choice reveals something holistically true about who the queens were, as people. Historical accounts of Mary’s personality, given the weaponized rumors that swirled around her reign, conflict; here, though, Mary, who chose marriage and motherhood, is presented as warm and kind and nurturing and sexual and, above all, feminine. Elizabeth, meanwhile, the virgin queen? “I am more man than woman now,” she tells her cousin. “This world has made me so.”

In that sense, Mary Queen of Scots does deliver on its promise of modernity: It manages to tap into ongoing anxieties that lurk, still, just below the cheerful surface of things, around pregnancy and fertility and motherhood. Here is a movie that assumes its characters’ maternal status to be a reflection of their personalities, their political fitness, their overall characters—a movie that suggests, based on a loose reading of history, that motherhood is implicitly feminine and its absence is implicitly not. The film’s fusty castles echo with whispers of the ways the American culture of the current moment, so proud of its progress, comes to similar conclusions: The woman who is a mother is to be congratulated; the woman who is not is to be pitied.

At roughly the same time that Mary Queen of Scots began screening in theaters, the Slate podcast Decoder Ring released an episode exploring the phenomenon of “Sad Jen”: a tale, told in the tabloids but also in American pop culture more broadly, of the ongoing struggles of Jennifer Aniston. The sadness of Sad Jen, the story goes, is made manifest not in her long and successful career—there is very little tragedy to be mined in that—but rather in the quiet spaces of her personal life. Sad Jen is sad, the storytellers have concluded, because of Brad—and specifically because of Pitt’s relationship with Angelina Jolie, who would become a mother to six children. It wasn’t just the jilting that made Sad Jen sad, the tabloids’ tale went; it was the fact that, in his departure, Brad had robbed her of motherhood itself.