Granite-hipped, toad- faced and as stern as her scepter, Queen Victoria was born to be a statue. But what if she wasn’t?
Covering the years just before and just after she assumed the throne at age 18, “The Young Victoria” redefines her as a haughty hottie who learned political chess at an age when she wasn’t allowed to walk down the stairs by herself.
Casting Emily Blunt in the title role, the movie effectively lays out how Victoria outsmarted her enemies, assumed the UK throne, found herself a stable husband and settled in for a 63-year reign.
You’re bound to well with patriotic pride, if you happen to be German. The young princess (whose first language was German and whose relations are seen referring to her as “Schatzi,” which in my rhyming dictionary shares some unfortunate company) is a determined young beauty working on an awkward long-distance relationship with the nephew of the king of Belgium. His not-really-all-that-Belgian name: Albert von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.
The film’s portrait of Her Majesty as a pretty nice girl may persuade you only a bit more than the Sinead O’Connor love ballad that wafts over the closing credits (“There’s oooonly me, and only yoooou.” Well, yes, and a few hundred million subjects). But a refined script from Julian Fellowes (who won an Oscar for writing “Gosford Park”) clearly explains the political intrigue, the romance, the protocol annoyances, the duty. I didn’t quite believe that this tiny girl could become the most powerful woman in the history of the world, but at the time perhaps no one believed it.
Moving into the just-completed Buckingham Palace, Victoria discovers the place is freezing. Apparently one footman is in charge of laying the fire, someone else in charge of lighting it. Worse: When it comes time to make a match with Prince Albert (a puppyish Rupert Friend), the rulebook says she must propose to him, in stark reversal of the more modern practice in which the woman simply intimidates the man into proposing.
Meanwhile, the evil Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong, who really isn’t — as in next week’s “Sherlock Holmes,” he’s nasty without being interesting) angles to make Victoria his puppet, while the cool, canny Prime Minister Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) guides the teen Queen around the traps. So close is their friendship — which the movie portrays as a full-on flirtation — that hecklers call Victoria “Mrs. Melbourne” at the opera. A constitutional crisis looms when Victoria refuses to appoint ladies in waiting allied with Melbourne’s rival, incoming Prime Minister Robert Peel.
Fellowes makes all of these elements fresh without aggressively pushing the line that old times were just like modern ones. All three points of the love triangle, meanwhile, are appealing, wreathed in tender looks and long walks in the gardens.
Staking out the center of recent royal dramas — nowhere near as dank and ruthless as Cate Blanchett’s “Elizabeth,” but weightier than Helen Mirren’s “The Queen” — “The Young Victoria” achieves a fine balance. I guess that’s what you get when a film is produced by both Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson.