Someday very soon, the movies will have chronicled every single year in the history of the British royal family, mining each bit of skullduggery, infidelity and expensive clothing.
The latest chapter in this goggle-eyed, frequently silly odyssey: “The Young Victoria,” a look at the early years of the longest-reigning monarch in English history.
Although the popular image of Victoria is the frumpy moralist of her later years (Judi Dench played the elder Victoria in “Mrs. Brown”), the new movie presents an entirely different character.
The young Victoria is played by Emily Blunt, the talented star of “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Sunshine Cleaning.” In other words, frump time is over.
We quickly tick through Victoria’s unusual accession to the throne, which involved her becoming the heir apparent at an early age, but having to wait until her 18th birthday to officially be crowned.
Her adolescent years were dominated by her overbearing mother (Miranda Richardson) and the conniving John Conroy (Mark Strong, also in “Sherlock Holmes” this week), a bounder widely presumed to be the mother’s lover.
Victoria rebelled against these two, and the early sections of the film present the kind of backroom machinations that make political drama so compelling.
Of course it’s also a love story — you saw that coming, right? — in which Victoria’s first cousin Albert (Rupert Friend) plays an increasingly large role. Here the movie differs from many sad royal marriage stories, as Victoria and Albert were apparently genuinely happy with each other.
“The Young Victoria” is written by Julian Fellowes, whose work on “Gosford Park” won an Oscar. The pieces for royal intrigue appear to be in place, yet this movie is oddly lackluster; at times it feels as though we’re getting only half the information we need to have a good royal wallow.
Jim Broadbent is splendid in a short role as King William, Victoria’s uncle, and Paul Bettany tries to get something going as Lord Melbourne, a political power-broker. But director Jean-Marc Vallee doesn’t align the pieces in a satisfying order. (Don’t worry, British readers, he’s not French — he’s Canadian, and thus part of the realm.)
Emily Blunt is skillful enough to hold things together for much of the movie. She’s especially good at shifting from quiet calm to forceful anger in a split second, the better to assure others of her authority.
Among the producers of this film is Sarah Ferguson, who married into the royal family in 1986 and knows something about the difficulties of the job. Yes, boo hoo, and all that. Perhaps “The Young Victoria” needed a slightly more skeptical take on its main character, who is treated sympathetically throughout.
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