Victoria and Abdul

Stephen Frears (2017)

Stephen Frears, working from a screenplay by Lee Hall, dramatises the platonic relationship between the elderly Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and the Indian Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), and the hostility both faced within the British royal household as a result.  Dispatched to England for a minor role in the Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1887, Abdul becomes Victoria’s confidant and the object of her maternal affections throughout the remaining years of her life.  The monarch’s actual son, the Prince of Wales (Eddie Izzard), is at the forefront of increasingly vigorous opposition to Abdul’s surprising status and influence on the Queen.  ‘Inspired by true events’, says the screen, at the start of Victoria and Abdul, before adding, after a little pause, ‘mostly’.  The last word appears in different, cursive lettering.  The archness of that ‘mostly’ foreshadows the isn’t-this-amusing tone of much of what follows.  Isn’t-it-amusing is in effect an assumption on the part of the people who made this film rather than a question.  Even so, it requires an answer, which is no.

Objections to costume drama with imperialist and racial themes, unless it’s the work of descendants of the victims of colonial oppression, are getting to be automatic nowadays.  That tendency can be vexing and unfair; in the case of Victoria and Abdul it’s more than justified.  Most of the supporting characters are required to double up as (a) representatives of imperial racism and (b) professional creeps, their noses put out of joint by Abdul’s ascendancy.  The combination of the two is, thanks to crude writing and acting, farcical:  (b) overwhelms (a) – the disgruntled courtiers have no more malignant weight than outraged acolytes in a panto.  This tonal misjudgment is all the more glaring in the light of the film’s occasional, clumsy lurches into straight-faced moral censure – as when Mohammed Buksh (Adeel Akhtar), who accompanies Abdul to England and humiliatingly becomes the other Indian’s servant, gives the future Edward VII a piece of his mind.  Or as when, after Victoria’s death, her successor cruelly ejects Abdul and his family and has them shipped back to India.  (The new king is so spitefully vengeful that he personally supervises the chucking out – as if.)   I thought there was a risk this tardy sequel to John Madden’s Mrs Brown (1997) would try to force the charm that emerged naturally in the earlier film but I didn’t expect anything as unfit for purpose as Victoria and Abdul turns out to be.  It’s shocking that a director as good as Stephen Frears has often been could perpetrate it, even if Lee Hall’s script is the fundamental problem.

When the Queen first asks him questions, Abdul tries to explain that he’s a clerk in an Agra jail but she immediately gets an idée fixe that he’s descended from a long line of learned men.  She has him give her Urdu lessons and educate her in the Koran; she calls him ‘the Munshi’ (Urdu for teacher).  Later on, however, she upbraids him for deceiving her about his social and professional status.  At the height of the Abdul-inspired revolt against the monarch, Miss Phipps (Fenella Woolgar), one of her attendants, summons the courage to tell the Queen, to her face, that she and other courtiers are ready to resign their position.  There’s then a showdown with the whole household:  Victoria challenges anyone wanting to leave to speak up immediately.  No one does and the Queen looks scornfully vindicated – even though Miss Phipps did just speak up.  It’s difficult to tell whether these bits of amnesia are indications that Victoria is becoming gaga or of sloppy storytelling.  A larger puzzle is why Stephen Frears has encouraged or allowed such gruesome overacting in some of the supporting roles.  Eddie Izzard and Olivia Williams (a lady-in-waiting), who merely vilify their characters, are bad enough.  Paul Higgins and Robin Soans, as other members of the royal entourage,are idiotic.  It may sound like welcome progress in a Raj-themed period piece that it’s white minor characters, rather than Indian ones, who pull faces and dash about comically but the spectacle is nonetheless excruciating.  Paul Higgins – as Reid, the Queen’s doctor – has to be singled out for special dispraise.  On television a few months ago, this mysteriously employed actor and Thandie Newton stood out like two sore thumbs in the strong cast of the latest Line of Duty.  The competition for worst performance in Victoria and Abdul is much keener but Higgins is a clear winner.

The closing legends imply that little was known about the film’s extraordinary central relationship until Abdul’s letters and diary came to light in 2010, a full century after his death (in 1909, at the age of forty-six, on the estate in Agra that Victoria had arranged for him).  The recent discovery of his writings may explain why it’s taken so long to produce a follow-up to Mrs Brown but the implication of a secret history is misleading.  Abdul Karim was a sufficiently well known figure for, for example, Elizabeth Longford to write in her 1964 biography of Victoria that he:

‘… stirred once more that same royal imagination which had magnified the virtues of John Brown … Nevertheless, [it] insinuated into her confidence an inferior person, while it increased the nation’s dizzy infatuation with an inferior dream, the dream of Colonial Empire.’

The film’s name is misleading too – at least for anyone who assumes that a balanced pairing of the title characters is in prospect.  Abdul is a sketchy conception and Lee Hall takes patronising care to ensure that he’s innocuous.  According to the film, Abdul is chosen to be a temporary royal attendant in England because he’s unusually tall.  (The much smaller Mohammed Buksh is a hasty substitute for another man, who meets with an accident just before the party is due to set off from India.)   Abdul, although a quick learner of English language and manners, is primarily a charming innocent abroad, secondarily a victim of racial prejudice and envy.   The script isn’t prepared to explore the tensions between him and Mohammed – whose grumbling is largely comical until he abruptly changes his tune with Bertie – or to give much sense of Abdul being, as well as adoring of Victoria, a canny opportunist.  At the Queen’s insistence, Abdul brings his wife (Sukh Ojla), whose existence he doesn’t at first mention, over to Britain.  Victoria is worried about the couple’s childlessness and has them both tested by Dr Reid.  Mrs Abdul’s examination supplies the worst of several dim burqa jokes.  Reid discovers that her husband is ‘riddled with the clap’; the doctor is ecstatic because this confirms his and others’ view of Abdul as a low-born wretch but it’s hard to believe that the nice young man the film presents could have contracted gonorrhea through extra-marital sex.  Ali Fazal, a big Bollywood name, has an appealing animation in his early scenes and is perfectly competent throughout yet his role seems essentially demeaning.   Fazal’s portrait works only because he shows us Abdul as if through the enchanted eyes of Victoria.

Which brings us to the only good reason for seeing Victoria and Abdul (and seeing it through).  Judi Dench, approaching her eighty-third birthday, is now older than Queen Victoria lived to be.  To repeat my thoughts watching Philomena (2013), Dench’s previous, much more successful collaboration with Stephen Frears:  you worry more with each film that you may be witnessing her swansong.  That worry is, sad to say, sharpened here by the presence in the cast of Tim Pigott-Smith.  (It’s a consolation that, as Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, he gives one of the few discreet and sympathetic supporting turns, along with Michael Gambon’s cameo of Lord Salisbury, the prime minister of the day.)  Judi Dench’s acting is without vanity and fearless.  She is masterly in transforming Victoria from the sour, fearful, isolated and moribund creature of the early scenes – working her way through the courses of a banquet to get them over with as quickly as possible, before she dozes off and snores – into the alert, amused woman whom Abdul has  reinvigorated.  The script, as well as laughably characterising Victoria as an anti-racist ahead of her time, skimps on what is potentially the most interesting element of the story:  how the Queen shrewdly exploits her authority to indulge a whim of iron.  When the Prince of Wales threatens to have his mother certified, Lee Hall gives Dench a long response in which she enumerates her faults and weaknesses before asserting that ‘I am anything but insane’.  You can see this punchline coming a mile off (even if you’ve not already heard it in the trailer) but the journey is more than worthwhile.  Even she can’t alchemise Victoria and Abdul as a whole yet it features, as do most things involving Judi Dench, great acting.  You emerge from this bad film feeling privileged.

18 September 2017