Guest post by Erin Blackwell.
I wanted to watch The Young Victoria (2009) because Miranda Richardson’s in it and I’m going through a watch-everything-she’s-in phase. Richardson talked up the film in an interview with the Daily Mail online. And I quote:
“I spent my time cross stitching,” she revealed. “But I made it fun by stitching naughty words into handkerchiefs.” Miranda, 51 [in 2009], wouldn’t be drawn on the exact words, but added, “There were long gaps between filming and I was bored, so it kept me occupied.”
If you have any plans to watch this film, you can’t do better than to follow her lead.
Yes, the film is boring. Yes, Victoria was boring. Yes, the costumes deserve their oscar, if awards are given on the basis of hysterical historic accuracy. And yes, Miranda looks fantabulous in her kooky pre-Victorian wig and ostrich feathers. (See video below.) There’s not enough Miranda in The Young Victoria. There’s not enough Miranda in anything since Dance with a Stranger (1985), so maybe just watch that again.
WHY, WHY, WHY
Why does England have a royal family? France killed its last king in 1793, over 200 years ago. Why is England so backward? Italy and Germany don’t have royals. Why did super-cool super-tool imperialist thug James Bond cross-pollinate its brand with dowdy old Queen Elizabeth to sell the world the London Olympics in 2012?
Why indeed.
Don’t tell me we’re meant to enjoy being subjugated, if only for the length of one of the movies that serve as marketing for, ah, the ruling class.
Why would an American worry about the correct curtsey? Or not speaking to Elizabeth until spoken to? What’s this game we’re all colluding in? Why even capitalize the Q in queen? She’s not our queen.
What possible interest could there be in retracing Victoria’s ascension to a 64-year reign of Britain and the British Empire?
Well, arguably, it’d be nice to have some insight into the psychology of She who reigned longer than any other woman in history, who gave her name to the Victorian Era, and whose personal quirks did much to promote the model of heterosexist monogamy Freud did his utmost to knock the stuffing out of.
That’s not happening here. This is distinctly a movie for the ice-cream cup and toffee crowd.
THE NOSE
Photographs of queen Victoria show us she was a chubby five-feet tall, with bulbous eyes, heavy lids, a bird’s beak of a nose, not much chin until she got older and then, multiple chins. She was never anything resembling a beauty. She needed neither beauty nor brains because she had birth, and progressively, girth. As did that over-fed, underworked letch, her son, Edward the seventh. But that’s all much later. The Young Victoria could almost be called The Virgin Victoria, since it ends abruptly with the birth of her first of nine children. That’s all these royals are good for, really: continuing their own ruddy bloodline.
Emily Blunt is zaftig, juicy, with sensuous features recalling the late princess Margaret, wildcat younger sister of the current queen Elizabeth. Blunt’s Victoria romps about stolidly pursuing some sense of self, trapped as she is in a thicket of interested parties. There’s nothing wrong with this actress, but she’s the wrong actress for this part, with the wrong nose.
THE SCRIPT
Julian Fellowes wrote the mind-bogglingly complex, creaky, slavish, finicky, disjointed, unfocussed script. Yes, he scripted Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001) and currently, BBC TV’s Downton Abbey. There’s an arse-licking profile of the smug royalist in December’s Vanity Fair. I devoured every syllable, green with envy. There’s not one word about The Young Victoria, which failed to recoup its $35 million-dollar budget.
In a Daily Mail interview, Fellowes uses some arcane derivative of the royal we to massage Victoria’s obsolescence:
“We live in the remains of a Victorian day. The way we lay the table, the way we sit in the dining room. Our views on marriage are essentially Victorian. Really, our morality, where it exists, is a Victorian morality that has struggled through. And I think you can find much of what is good about our society if you look closely at the nineteenth century.”
THE PLOT
“Her destiny belonged to an empire, but her heart belonged to one man,” heralds the trailer, and I’m afraid that’s a fairly accurate description of the historical Victoria. She really did love Albert with a crazy love — which was disastrous, as he died when she still had 40 years to go. She basically retired from life without abdicating from the throne.
One of the strands of plot is the confection of that romance, which, if you’re the sucker for costumes I am, is not without its charms. German Romantic composer Schubert gets his fair share of air time, with his solid hit, “Standchen” (Serenade).
The second strand of plot involves a Dickens-derivative couple of monsters — her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent (Richardson), and her evil minder, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). They’re enough to write an entire movie about and too complex to understand when demoted, as they are here, to melodramatic villains. They try to swindle Victoria out of her crown and into a regency by which they’d rule in her stead, but are thwarted.
To be honest, there’s a third strand, which I forgot about it’s so boring, starring prime minister Lord Melbourne manipulating young Vicky’s heart and mind until Albert comes along to take over the reins. Paul Bettany plays him like a sandblasted surfer, without an ounce of nuance or neurosis, but really, it’s the dismaying spectacle of weak-willed Vicky that plunges me into denial the scenes even exist.
For all his cleverness, screenwriter Fellowes fails to synthesize historical accuracy, heterosexual imperative, and hero worship into a cohesive statement on the interplay of sex and politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.
SUPPORTING PLAYERS
Jim Broadbent plays the old king who exerts himself to survive long enough to pass the crown directly to Victoria, thereby bypassing her conniving mum. Perhaps you remember him as the bartender in The Crying Game (1993). That was a better role, but this is a better wig. He has a great moment at the head of an ostentatious dinner table, humiliating the Duchess of Kent.
Harriet Walter, one the greatest stage actresses of her generation, is crystalline as the queen who steps down on Victoria’s ascension. She’s got a long, unlovely face, the right kind of nose, and such clear focus you actually feel while she’s onscreen the film’s going to make sense.
Miranda Richardson doesn’t get too far with the Duchess of Kent, disappearing into the costumes and scenery in the manner of a method actress bored out of her mind after hours of cross-stitching. Or a cupie doll lost among the stuffed toys in a shooting gallery. However, there’s a lively snatch of Miranda-babble as she’s interviewed in full regalia, trying to make sense of what she’s been given to do.
ROLE MODEL
As a teenager, I was entranced with Renaissance virgin queen Elizabeth the first because she danced well, spoke several foreign languages living and dead, wrote sonnets, and was played with great fustian by Bette Davis opposite Errol Flynn. She was also involved in all sorts of intrigues, and had privy counsellors. Shakespeare wrote and performed for her. Wow. She whitened her face with pulverized egg shells, set off by red curls, and her forehead was a forerunner of Paula Broadwell’s. She wore weird gowns studded with precious jewels while telling men what to do.
And, of course, Queenie was breathtakingly portrayed by Miranda Richardson as a tyrannical baby in the comic BBC series, Blackadder. I tried to also like queen Victoria, because she’d been queen even longer, but as a personality she was a dud, obsessed with her own feelings and worse, other people’s morality. Famously, she excised all mention of woman-on-woman action from the landmark English law against homosexuality because, well, it just wasn’t done.
More governed than governing, busier breeding than reading, Victoria was a bit of a stubborn, self-righteous old hog who did nothing to further the political cause of women because she believed, “We women are not made for governing.”
LAST WORDS
It’d be so interesting if somebody would film the life — early, middle, or late — of queen Victoria as it must’ve been, from inside the royal cult, with its weird rituals and exotic entitlements, without concessions to a modern mass audience. Miranda comes closest to suggesting how inbred, uptight, obsessive the whole lot of them were. Not so very unlike the present cast of characters, except that they, post-Freud, have been sexually liberated. Not a pretty picture.
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Erin Blackwell is a consulting astrologer who was raised to regard movies as a form of worship. She blogs at venus11house.