The Royal Treatment
By Matt Connolly
The Young Victoria
Dir. Jean-Marc Vallée, U.K., Apparition
How much you like The Young Victoria can be measured in direct proportion to the level of enjoyment you get from the following: parliamentary intrigue; impeccably dressed men and women with knowing looks in their eyes, whispering to one another at long dinner tables; gliding tracking shots of young lovers dancing at lavish balls, complete with full-bodied orchestral accompaniment. For some, The Young Victoria will be yet another one of those pieces of middlebrow piffle that measures seriousness by the number of high-toned speeches it can jam into its (usually too long) running time. Personally, I have a weakness for this stuff. I like the sly exchange of palace gossip amongst those oh-so-world-weary members of the royal court, gazing out over a sumptuous ballroom as they whisper scandalous rumors to one another in low voices. I dig the blustery words about power and loyalty that are often hollow at their center but sound full of gravitas when trumpeted from whatever aging British actor happens to be on screen. And I love a good ball sequence, with carnal yearning channeled into choreographed pageantry. Sure, it can grow tiresome to watch these tropes dragged out and dusted off year after year, decorating yet another slice of holiday Oscar bait like faded decorations on an emaciated Christmas tree. But there’s still a pulse to be discovered within them, when one bothers to reconnect to their lively theatricality.
The Young Victoria does this, which still doesn’t make it anything more than it is: a thematically muddled showcase for talented British actors to dress in gorgeous costumes and speak in particularly rounded vowels. But director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Julian Fellowes seemingly understand the strengths of their chosen genre, as well as its limitations, and act accordingly. The result is a period biopic that allows the viewer to linger on small tactile delights and emotional nuances, making its more clunky narrative moves feel like unavoidable nuisances rather than deal-breaking blunders.
The film opens before the beginning of the eponymous monarch’s reign. Next in line for the throne once the blustery King William (Jim Broadbent) passes away, Victoria (Emily Blunt) chafes at the tight control that her mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), and her mother’s scheming advisor (Mark Strong) have over her life. William soon dies, and Victoria quickly isolates both of them. However, the issue of outside influence over her political and personal choices remains at the forefront of the film. The seventeen-year-old’s youth and inexperience leads her to heavily lean on the advice of Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany), a savvy court operator with potentially self-serving motives. Her public support soon begins to falter after a series of gaffes leads her to be seen as partisan and under Melbourne’s thumb. However, political gamesmanship ultimately takes a backseat to matters of the heart in The Young Victoria, as the film slowly shifts its focus to the burgeoning romance between Victoria and her cousin Prince Albert (Rupert Friend). They bond over their controlling families and royal upbringings, and Victoria—who vowed earlier to not let a husband further control her life—ultimately proposes to Albert. The difficulty of balancing their private and public roles quickly becomes evident, though, when Albert attempts to assist Victoria in her duties as monarch.
It’s a balance that the two seem to figure out by film’s end. Alas, The Young Victoria never quite gets there. On one hand, the film purports to be about the maturation of a youthful queen, who strives for intellectual and emotional independence even as she seeks out outside (and primarily male) advice. On the other, Fellowes’s screenplay ultimately structures the Victoria/Albert romance around the notion that the queen must learn to share her burdens and responsibilities with her adoring, eager husband. These two ideas are not necessarily opposed, but The Young Victoria lacks the thematic elegance to meld them into a coherent statement on the give-and-take of power that apparently defined the queen’s professional and personal relationships. We remain unsure throughout if we’re rooting for Victoria, the independent-minded monarch, or Victoria, the conciliatory lover. This uncertainty makes the film’s denouement feel haphazard: resolving one dynamic while largely ignoring the other.
The pleasures of The Young Victoria are to be found in the aesthetic, rather than the theoretical, realm. Martin Scorsese acts as one of the film’s three producers, and it’s clear that Vallée has been influenced by The Age of Innocence’s methods of livening up the costume drama. A quick introduction to the royal court’s key players comes via a rapidly edited montage, each individual’s entrance sliced up into hard, snappy cuts on slamming doors, swords sliding into sheaths, etc. Such flourishes lack the precision and depth of Scorsese’s earlier masterpiece, but these mildly kinetic moves are welcome, making the intrigues and power plays of the seventeenth-century English court feel less like textbook tableaux by tapping into their juicy undercurrents of ego and competition. It also helps the romance at the film’s center. There’s no lovelier moment in The Young Victoria than when the young queen enters a grand ballroom and looks offscreen to find Albert waiting. Vallée doesn’t cut to tell us who Victoria is looking at, and he doesn’t need to. Victoria seems to float across the floor, the camera following her in a tight close-up until she arrives in Albert’s arms. Vallée keeps us close as the two stare into one another’s eyes and begin to dance, the tracking shot swirling in time to the lush score. Sure, it’s an Ophüls knock-off, but it has a swooning, sensuous charge.
It also works because of the enraptured delight that sweeps across Blunt’s face. What one remembers most about The Young Victoriacomes from the way Blunt uses her inquisitive eyes: narrowing in contempt when confronting her mother’s arrogant advisor; widening with conspiratorial glee when she walks out of her first meeting as queen, as if she herself can hardly believe the position she now occupies. She and Friend have a nicely spontaneous chemistry; you sense the pleasure they take in one another’s mind and body. Blunt doesn’t transcend the role’s generic limitations by any means, but she really doesn’t need to. Like the film that surrounds it, her performance rests not upon an upending of genre convention, but a spirited belief in its continued emotional potency.