‘Victoria & Abdul’ illuminates only half the title
Stop us if this sounds familiar: A tall, dark, bearded servant of rough breeding comes from far away to suddenly charm a grumpy, widowed Queen Victoria and thus upend Britain’s royal court at the turn of the 20th century.
You were perhaps thinking of the film “Mrs. Brown,’’ starring Judi Dench as the monarch and Bill Connolly as her Scottish underling, John Brown? Well, hold on. A new movie has come along exactly 20 years later with an eerily similar plot. Either Victoria was a creature of habit in her attachments or her filmmakers are.
Substitute Connolly with Ali Fazal and you get “Victoria & Abdul,’’ a film about the thenmost powerful woman on earth’s second unusually intimate relationship with a commoner. In this case, a Muslim from India in 1887.
Fascinatingly, Dench is back as the monarch, two decades after she played Victoria and earned an Oscar nomination for it. It’s a privilege to watch her revisit the crusty, we-arenot-amused queen, who is now in the twilight of her life. Dench is riveting, unsentimental, impatient and gloriously brittle. Sometimes all she does is offer an irritated sigh, speaking volumes.
“Everyone I loved has died and I just go on and on,’’ she cries.
Dench is well supported — the cast includes the marvelous Eddie Izzard, the late Tim Pigott-Smith and the imperious Michael Gambon — and the pomp and highly choreographed English ceremonialism is captured beautifully by director Stephen Frears, who knows a thing or two about royalty, having directed Helen Mirren in “The Queen.’’
Much of this film is composed of stuffy royal banquets with hundreds of servants scurrying about or soaring landscapes with hundreds of servants scurrying around.
There’s only one major problem: The man at the centre, Abdul Karim. He remains a blank canvas, his motives unexplored, his interior or domestic life uncaptured. He is called “the brown John Brown’’ and offers no riposte. The title of the film promises us two people but we only get one.
Perhaps screenwriter Lee Hall (“War Horse,’’ ‘’Billy Elliot”) meant to leave him a cypher, allowing the English to try to define him, but that’s being generous. It’s hard to leave this film and not think that Spike Lee’s concept of ‘’magical Negroes” needs to be expanded for other people of colour.