Jean-Marc Vallée’s film (written by Julian Fellowes),
The Young Victoria, is a very handsome picture deserving
of every credit for its respectful posture towards the past and
especially towards royalty, which it would have been easy for it
to have patronized. M. Vallée also elicits fine performances by
Emily Blunt as Princess, later Queen Victoria and Rupert Friend
as the earnest young German Prince Albert, who falls in love with
her. Yet the movie was rather a disappointment to me — I think
because, for understandable reasons, it focused too exclusively
on the romance between its two principal characters for us to be
able to make much sense out of that much larger part of their
lives that was lived in the world of the 1830s (and beyond) and
apart from the universally understood love story.
In a film set in our own times, of course, this wouldn’t
matter, because we could take the world apart from the private
one of the two lovers for granted. But in a period setting, the
period must be given a bit more attention than it is given here
in order for us to be able to make sense of who the characters
are and, therefore, of their romance itself. This is all the more
true in the case of world-historical characters like Victoria and
Albert. Insofar as they have any existence apart from their love
for each other in the film, they are both a part of extended
royal families and rival European courts in which thwarted
ambition on all sides has produced secret and not-so-secret
hatreds, resentments and estrangements. That’s all very well as
far as it goes, but it only embeds the love story in a royal soap
opera and doesn’t get us any closer to a broader or deeper
significance to the film’s events.
You could say that the film takes both too little and too
much for granted. Too little because it cannot trust us to know
enough about the period or the historical background and so keeps
that mostly out of things, except where absolutely necessary; too
much because at the same time it implicitly relies on our knowing
who Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were and what was their
significance in the history of Britain and the world. By the time
the producers get around to putting up some screen cards with a
bit of potted history on them at the end to fill us in on these
details — and, of course, what happens to the principal
characters during the rest of their lives — it is too late. Why
would we have been watching in the first place, unless we already
knew of her importance?
The central moment in the film comes when the young
princess is playing chess with her suitor and asks: “Do you ever
feel like a chess piece yourself in a game being played against
your will?” She does, she confides to him, adding: “I’m sure half
the politicians are ready to seize hold of my skirts and drag me
from square to square.”
Prince Albert replies: “Then you had better master the
rules of the game until you play it better than they can.”
“You don’t recommend I find a husband to play it for me?”
she says with an anachronistic feminist ominousness.
“I should find one to play it with you, not for you,” says
Albert.
It makes for a nice melding of the two themes of love and
royal politics, but it promises us rather more of an immersion in
the latter than the film is prepared to deliver. We get that the
immediate royal family is a dysfunctional one, particularly in
the tension between King William IV (Jim Broadbent) and his late
brother’s wife (Miranda Richardson), who is also the mother of
his heir. She is manipulated by her secretary, Sir John Conroy
(Mark Strong), who hopes to become the power behind the throne
when Victoria is queen, but he plays his chess pieces very badly
and only succeeds in alienating the young princess by his
heavy-handedness. If seeing him off is the hardest thing she has
to do on becoming queen, she hardly needs any help from the
willing Albert.
The real test comes with her affection for the Whig prime
minister at her accession to the throne, Lord Melbourne (Paul
Bettany), which creates a constitutional crisis when she
improperly prefers him to the Tory leader, Sir Robert Peel, thus
giving the latter an excuse to decline to form a government and
sparking a popular outcry in “the Bedchamber Crisis” of 1839. We
are shown that it is Albert alone who overcomes the Queen’s
stubbornness by defying her and then by saving her life in an
assassination attempt — nearly at the cost of his own. In fact,
the reasons for the Queen’s about-face would have been plenty
without the persuasive powers of Prince Albert, or his
willingness to take a bullet for her, to second them. In fact,
the assassin missed both members of the royal couple — though it
is quite true that the Prince did attempt to shield his wife with
his own body.
Yet this telling of a central part of her story seems to me
to trivialize and render almost insignificant what is surely by
any reckoning the most important royal figure of the 19th century
and one without whom neither British nor European nor world
history, including our own cultural history, would today be
comprehensible. This is the peril of the biopic, I suppose, and
one into which Bright
Star also fell a
few months ago. There is a mystery about greatness, whether of
Queen Victoria’s kind or of John Keats’s and, as I see it, the
film-maker has a responsibility to try (at least) to penetrate
it. To concentrate too much on the human story because the
history is too hard for today’s audiences to cope with is,
however understandable it may be, an abdication of that
responsibility. That’s only one man’s opinion, of course. And, as
I say, there’s a lot to like about The Young Victoria.
But did they really have to have a soppy pop song by Sinead
O’Connor (of all people) over the closing credits? Talk about
striking a jarring note!
