Jean-Marc Vallée (2009)
The other day, I happened to notice the entry for ‘biopic’ in our Chambers dictionary – ‘a film, usu. an uncritically admiring one, telling the life-story of a celebrity’. I was surprised: although biopics that verge on hagiography aren’t unusual, I didn’t realise this was regarded as practice standard enough for inclusion in a dictionary definition. The Young Victoria both is and isn’t a biopic-according-to-Chambers. What’s interesting about the film is the tension between royalist sycophancy and the more personal and convincing love story being told. The latter discloses itself in spite of the grand accoutrements that were no doubt the movie’s primary selling point (although it wasn’t a great hit at the box office). This duality is reflected in the score by Ilan Eshkeri, which includes syrupy-ceremonial passages and quieter, sparer ones. (‘Only You’, a wet ‘love theme’ by Eshkeri and others, sung over the closing credits by Sinead O’Connor, doesn’t fit with either of the film’s registers.) The duality may derive from the somewhat two-faced talent of the man who wrote the screenplay.
At the time of the film’s release, Julian Fellowes was best known as the author of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), for which Fellowes won an Academy Award. Little more than a year after The Young Victoria, he had created Downton Abbey and taken his seat in the House of Lords as a life peer on the Conservative benches. (His fiction output has also included speeches written for Iain Duncan Smith, during the latter’s short life as Tory leader between 2001 and 2003.) Fellowes married into the aristocracy and it’s hard now not to see him as a commercially smart purveyor of poshness. The legends on screen at the end of The Young Victoria summarise what Victoria and Albert went on to achieve. The last of these notes that she remains Britain’s longest-reigning monarch – ‘To date’[1]. The archness of that ‘To date’ strikes me as typical of Julian Fellowes: although his attitude towards the upper classes is one of affectionate pride, his expression of this pride is often gruesomely tongue-in-cheek. Yet, as he showed with Gosford Park and intermittently shows in the script for The Young Victoria, there’s more to him as a screenwriter than you might (or I might like to) think.
The Young Victoria starts unpromisingly. A load of title cards set the historical scene and specify the several, quickly changing locations of the action. (The film’s title comes up almost incidentally on screen between two of these place indicators.) The luxurious sets (Patrice Vermette, Maggie Gray) and Oscar-winning costumes (Sandy Powell) serve their eye-catching purpose but distract attention from the sense of imprisonment by which Princess Victoria (Emily Blunt), heiress presumptive to the throne during the last years of the reign of her uncle William IV (Jim Broadbent), is oppressed – the sense of oppression is asserted rather than dramatised. Victoria’s widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), is under the influence of the comptroller of her household, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). His motives are clear: Conroy wants the king to die while Victoria is still a minor so that her mother will be appointed regent and he’ll be the power behind the throne, but how and why Conroy is able utterly to dominate the Duchess are not explained. Gradually, however, the courtship of Victoria and Albert (Rupert Friend) develops, and prevails above the film’s formidable production values and other obstacles. Jean-Marc Vallée perceives and skilfully exploits the human potential of the material; Julian Fellowes’s dialogue is often efficient and occasionally sensitive; and most of the cast succeed in creating surprisingly individual characters.
This is especially true of Emily Blunt, who, as the princess and then the new queen, conveys a winning fusion of entitlement, trepidation and determination. When the Saxe-Coburg brothers, Albert (Rupert Friend) and Ernest (Michiel Huisman), first visit Victoria, Albert has been coached by his adviser, Baron Stockmar (Jesper Christensen), to know, and to pretend to share, the princess’s tastes in literature, music and opera. Emily Blunt captures beautifully Victoria’s frustration with Albert’s rote learning and Rupert Friend, who combines the looks of a fairytale Prince Charming with the expression of a keen practical and emotional intelligence, immediately picks up on her exasperation. This is the beginning of an increasingly engaging relationship that is well acted, directed and written: Blunt, Friend, Vallée and Fellowes realise Victoria and Albert’s growing feelings for each other, in ways that make their courtship feel fresh and supple – free from an historical drama straitjacket but never jarringly ‘modern’. If the script is careful to avoid verbal anachronism, it seems that it’s not always so scrupulous about historical accuracy in the events of the story. Albert takes an assassin’s bullet aimed at Victoria; his bravery enables the couple to overcome a rocky patch in their marriage that’s been caused by Albert’s insistence on not only discharging more royal duties but also exerting greater authority. The core monarchist audience for The Young Victoria will happily believe that he would have laid down his life for his wife, and vice versa, but the injury that Albert suffered is an invention (and, according to an article in the Daily Telegraph, did not amuse the present queen when she saw the film).
In the supporting parts, Jim Broadbent and Jesper Christensen are especially vivid and convincing, and Miranda Richardson does well in the underwritten role of Victoria’s fretful mother. The script conceives Sir John Conroy too crudely as the villain of the piece and Mark Strong gives a rare uneasy and less than well-judged performance, although his eyes manage to suggest there’s more to Conroy than meets the ear. Paul Bettany’s characterisation of Lord Melbourne, Victoria’s first prime minister, is a little too mannered but Vallée and Fellowes get across well enough Melbourne’s influence on the queen and its political effects. The cast also includes Harriet Walter (William IV’s consort, Adelaide), Thomas Kretschmann (stiff as King Leopold I of Belgium), Julian Glover (the Duke of Wellington – with a stunningly large prosthetic nose) and Michael Maloney (Sir Robert Peel).
10-11 April 2015
[1] Afternote: Elizabeth II has now, of course, broken the record.
