Victoria & Abdul: Judi Dench rules a movie that could have been so much more

With Victoria & Abdul, we are in lovely and genteel Masterpiece Theatre territory where grand dame Judi Dench plays a pale and pasty octogenarian Queen Victoria who falls for a swarthy, bearded and turbaned Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) from India. Victoria & Abdul, directed by Stephen Frears, could even be called a romantic comedy.

Wait. What?

Sure, it may be more platonic than romantic, perhaps more an affair of the heart rather then genitals, but still, there is genuine chemistry between the aging Queen, whose many titles include Empress of India, and her servant-cum-confidant Abdul. He’s traveled all the way from India to Buckingham Palace in London to present her an honorary coin for her 1887 Golden Jubilee and runs smack up against English protocol as pomp and circumstance slap him in his turbaned face. But eyes meet. Pleasantries exchanged. Common interests discovered. Call it romance, or call it what you will. And, remarkably, there is comedy — if not laughs, at least smiles and chuckles and knowing pleasures — aplenty in this story “based on real events…mostly” as the opening credits inform us. 

There are more than a few entanglements as these star-crossed companions have their friendship thwarted by less-convivial forces bearing down upon them. After all, she’s old and he’s young, she’s white and he’s brown, she’s Christian and he’s Muslim, she’s widowed and he’s married, she’s English and he’s Indian, she’s the Queen of England and he’s a common uneducated clerk. To put it bluntly, she’s his superior and he’s her inferior. 

Those in power — church, state, aristocracy — are appalled and horrified by this turn of events as the aging monarch seems to have gone off her Victorian rocker under the suasion of this outsider. Victoria’s son Bertie (Eddie Izzard), the future King Edward VII, is especially vicious and unforgiving of his mother whom he sees merely as a bloated matriarch past her prime, contemptuous of this dark-skinned interloper.

But the Queen has turned away from decades of dour, morose mourning, finding in Abdul a sweet, gentle, and wise friend, her Munshi — Hindi for teacher or secretary — as he’s teaching her to read and write Urdu.  Can we say that Abdul even restores Victoria’s long-lost girlishness, encouraging her spry silliness as she warbles Gilbert and Sullivan’s Buttercup. She confesses to him, "I am cantankerous, greedy, fat. I am perhaps, disagreeably, attached to power." That Abdul is tall and attractive, "terribly handsome" as Victoria admits, exotic and foreign, only enrages the Suits even more.

This is not the first time that Victoria has had an eye for rougher trade. John Madden directed Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown (1997) twenty years ago as a widowed Victoria who had found solace in Mr. Brown, a rugged and unrefined Scot on the household staff. That Dench played that part too only adds to the believable cross-referencing in the Victoria & Abdul script where Victoria picnics with Abdul in the Scottish highlands outside Balmoral and confesses to him about how much she misses dear John Brown. 

I suppose such relationships between those with superior authority over their inferiors should be a cause of concern — the Queen with a Scottish servant, now with an Indian clerk — well, we know how the imbalance of power in such relationships works. But in neither film was there any hint that such fondness, kind regard — OK, love even, was coerced or manipulated. Both Mr. Brown and Abdul are certainly in positions of subservience, so far-below as to be out-of-sight from the austere head of the British Empire.

And it’s doubtful that Queen Victoria, with her bred-in-the-bone English colonialist mentality, was as enlightened and progressive about race relations as this film would have us believe. If she reaches out to the non-white ethnics, it's part of the noblesse oblige that suggests with her great entitlement comes occasional regard for the masses. The whole point of making sure the sun never set on the English Empire was essentially to colonize the known world, subduing their uncivilized lessers to provide England with its tea and spices and rubber. Queen Victoria is an integral part of that racist, colonialist mindset. Britain may have removed themselves from the slave trade as early as 1807 (outlawed the slave trade, not slavery), but that didn't end their self-righteous, god-given dominance over the far-flung colonies of coloreds. To suggest otherwise, as this film does, is to relegate the arrogant British and their far-reaching bigoted cruelty to the dim recesses of quaint Victoriana.

Indeed, while Abdul is exulting in his unexpected cosseted lifestyle among the rich and famous, literally and figuratively kissing the feet of the Queen, his counterparts back home on the Indian subcontinent will still be beaten and tortured under the iron English fist until the Indian independence in 1947.

But, but, if she manages to find some solace in her widowhood and enjoy this unlikely alliance with someone who unpretentiously teaches her about a history and culture so foreign to her — even lessons from the Koran, even love poetry by Rumi — why deny her that? If she is comforted by a good-looking man who sees a woman underneath all that ceremonial bustle and garb, meet and laugh with an upbeat, buoyant, optimistic, funny guy; a man who even introduces her to curries with spicy garam masala (literally "heating the body") and to the succulent mango, well, who’s to say those shove-your-face-in-the-juices-of-life pleasures are not for her?

After all, she is the Queen. She is amused.

Screenwriter Lee Hall (Billy Elliott) based his script on Shrabani Basu's book Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant, culled from the long-hidden history of their affair of the heart as revealed in Abdul's diary and Victoria's journals. There are 13 volumes of journals! All handwritten, in Urdu, by Victoria!! When's the last time you learned to read and write a foreign language, Urdu no less, and then hand-wrote 13 volumes as testimony to love?

It will likely bring Dench another Oscar nomination. It will bring Bollywood star Ali Fazal to greater worldwide prominence. And it was much fun to watch Eddie Izzard, though barely recognizable, strut his stuff as the dissipated, posturing king-in-waiting Prince of Wales. Tim Piggot-Smith (The Jewel in the Crown) as Victoria's long-time put-upon private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby is masterful, Simon Callow as the opera composer Puccini is ham personified, Michael Gambon as the Prime Minister is quintessential English cut-glass aristocracy. The film vibrates with authenticity considering the location shooting in India, Windsor, the Scottish Highlands, Osborne House in the Isle of Wight with its India-centric Durbar Room, even a weekend getaway to Florence. It really is a life-affirming movement on Victoria's part as the locations track her emotional journey that she experiences with Abdul from the cold, lacerating winds of Scotland to the warm glow of the Mediterranean. It's not surprising that Brits turn to Italy when their icy blood needs thawing.

The film could have, should have, explored more deeply the complexities of these relationships — Victoria's with Abdul, Great Britain's with India. We know considerably more about Victoria than we know about Abdul who remains the exotic, mysterious outsider. We learn even less about the centuries-old coercion and control that Britain forced onto this faraway colony. Instead, Victoria & Abdul opts for something less challenging, less forthright, less historically accurate — based mostly on real events, after all — perhaps something for the multiplex crowd who wants merely a sweet May-December love story.

It's still a charming film, full of grace notes to savor and enjoy, just as mango chutney can calm the palate after a piquant curry.

 

 

This article appears in Oct 19-26, 2017.