It ain’t ’alf hot Ma'am
Judi Dench is superb, of course. But with its toilet humour and rudely shaped jellies, Victoria & Abdul sometimes feels more like...
Victoria & Abdul C ert: PG 1hr 52mins ★★★★★
For the first 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, what is most notable about Victoria & Abdul is not how classy or well photographed it is but how broadly, even crudely, the comedy is being played. Honestly, there are moments early on when this is less the moving story of Queen Victoria’s last great love affair, more Carry On Up The Khyber.
Setting off at an almost indecent pace, director Stephen Frears (whose hits include Philomena, a film about Limerick-mother Philomena Lee’s decades-long search for her adopted son) here peppers his narrative with cheap gags about royal bowel movements, repeated references to ‘an incident with an elephant’ and the lack of medal-bearing trays at Windsor Castle. Even a wobbly and faintly phallic-looking jelly is played for laughs.
I don’t know about you but this was certainly not what I was expecting from a film that reunites Frears with the great Judi Dench and reunites Dench herself with the royal role that she last played 20 years ago in the Bafta-winning
Mrs Brown and which memorably co-starred Billy Connolly.
Yes, later on there are a couple of great speeches that could easily garner her more award nods, but those comedy undercurrents – and the feeling that Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall are over-pandering to a modern audience – never quite go away.
Would any homesick Indian servant of that era really say ‘Cut all the nicey, nicey c**p – let’s get the hell out of here’? Would any devout Muslim introduce his identically burka-clad wife and mother-in-law to the Queen before joking: ‘At least I think it’s that way round’? Well, they do here.
Slowly, however, a not uninteresting story emerges that begins in Agra, northern India, in 1887, where local British dignitaries have decided that the Queen – who was also Empress of India, of course – should be presented with a special jubilee medal. Knowing her penchant for tall men, two local civil servants have been selected, but following said incident with the elephant one has been replaced with someone shorter. Presumably on the grounds of comedy.
But when the mismatched pair arrive in Britain, the taller and more handsome one – Abdul Karim (played by the tall and handsome Indian actor Ali Fazal) – almost instantly catches the world-weary eye of an ageing, overweight monarch who has been grieving for her beloved Albert for a quarter of a century and whose former favourite, John Brown, had died four years earlier. Defying all royal protocol, Abdul not only makes direct eye contact with the Queen but falls to the ground to kiss her feet. Which goes down surprisingly well. ‘I suddenly feel a lot better,’ she announces, breaking into a smile for the first time in the film. Finally, we’re off with the story of the burgeoning relationship between monarch and servant very obviously echoing the arc of John Madden’s Mrs Brown from 1997, but without ever quite capturing its complexity and class. And for that it’s Lee Hall’s screenplay that must chiefly take the blame. He may have found deserved fame for both Billy Elliot and War Horse but Hall is still relatively inexperienced when it comes to cinematic screenplays, and this feels like a step into the slight unknown for him. The lonely Queen apart – ‘everyone I have really loved is dead and
I just go on and on and on’ – he offers little in the way of characterisation, and when the story needs to deepen, it doesn’t. Or not much.
The compensation, as we watch Victoria grow ever-more dependent on her devoted servant, is some very nice acting from a wonderful cast of top-class character actors.
Dench, at 82, is 14 years older than Victoria would have been when Abdul arrived in Britain, but she’s totally convincing as the bored, isolated monarch who’s already in physical and emotional decline. ‘Look at me,’ she exclaims at one point, ‘a fat, lame, impotent, silly old woman.’
But, as Abdul is appointed her ‘Munshi’ and begins to teach her both Urdu and the Koran, it’s those supporting performances that catch the eye.
The late Tim Pigott-Smith, very touchingly, is the epitome of pomposity and befuddlement as Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s understandably miffed private secretary, but even better is an almost unrecognisable Eddie Izzard giving possibly the performance of his career as Bertie – the frustrated Prince of Wales and heir apparent, of course – who can’t believe that his mother is still alive, let alone so in thrall to an Indian servant.
Fazal’s performance, by comparison, is likeable but a little one-dimensional, though it has to be said he gets precious little help from the script.
The discovery that Abdul is a Muslim (until then it is blithely assumed he is Hindu) certainly gives the story a modern resonance (Prince Charles is famously fascinated by Islam). but at other points a certain weariness with another episode from Victoria’s currently much-chronicled life sets in, particularly in the light of an introductory caption: ‘Based on real events… mostly.’
But the film is funny and undemanding, and Dench is excellent. So while Victoria &
Abdul does have its shortcomings, it’s also one of the films you’ll definitely want to see for yourself this autumn.