Tiptoeing around big debates
Queen Victoria’s deep friendship with her Scottish servant John Brown, following the death of her husband Prince Albert, made for captivating drama in John Madden’s Mrs. Brown, and also earned an Oscar nomination for lead star Judi Dench.
Dench returns to the role 20 years later, once again courting Best Actress consideration, with Stephen Frears’ dramatic comedy Victoria & Abdul. The handsomely mounted movie adds some anticolonial satire to another tale of unorthodox affection between the now-septuagenarian Queen and a devoted underling. Victoria’s era is synonymous with sexual repression, so her rumoured romances are understandably catnip to filmmakers.
The Abdul of the title, played by Bollywood star Ali Fazal, is Abdul Karim, an Indian prison clerk brought to England in 1887, as part of that year’s Golden Jubilee celebrations of Victoria’s long reign.
As the story goes, which a cheeky note says is “mostly” based on fact — screenwriter Lee Hall adapts a book by Shrabani Basu — it’s a case of fascination at first sight between Victoria and Abdul, their eyes locking when he illicitly meets the royal gaze at a banquet.
Is there lust in Victoria’s look, as the movie implies, or is the interest more “maternal,” as more prosaic historical records insist? Frears, usually more fearless in his filmmaking, seems reluctant to speculate too freely about this odd couple. Abdul and Victoria are worlds apart in age and ethnicity (he’s decades younger and Muslim) and also social standing (he’s a commoner in a land she rules as Empress of India).
Not so fettered is Dench, who impishly sets about to get people talking, both on and off the screen, as she seizes upon Abdul as the means for busting out of her gilded-cage existence.
Her boredom is palpable, as she grumpily slurps her soup and tears at her food with her fingers, indicating irritation with ceaseless protocol — and also possible trouble with the “royal colon,” as her hovering doctor (Paul Higgins) observes.
Abdul offers her a form of escape, as he introduces her to the foods, languages and customs of India, a land Victoria has never visited. She declares him to be her Munshi — one who both teaches and inspires — much to the barely disguised chagrin and racial intolerance of her son Bertie (Eddie Izzard, playing the future King Edward VII) and various minions and officials who include Lord Salisbury (Michael Gambon), Lady Churchill (Olivia Williams) and Sir Henry Ponsonby (Tim Pigott-Smith).
The supporting cast is marvellous, but anyone up against a presence as vital as Judi Dench in full royal mode has their work cut out for them.
Abdul’s motivations are never fully revealed — is he smitten, or a schemer? We learn he has other entanglements, and his view of history makes him a controversial teacher to a British monarch.
In this film, Frears zeroes in on the soulless bureaucracy of the people running Victoria’s household and state affairs: stiff-collared men with waxed moustaches and pearl-clutching women in smothering dresses, all eager to uphold the Empire’s status quo.
And what of the very thorny issue of colonial rule, which is observed but not fully addressed? The sharpest comments about it are made not by the ever-smiling Abdul, but rather by his amusingly obstreperous friend Mohammed (Adeel Akhtar), whose distaste for all things British range from politics to food.
One couldn’t say that of Victoria & Abdul, a film of solid craftsmanship led by another royally magnificent performance by Judi Dench.