BEFORE: Picking up exactly where last night's film left off, this film centers on Queen Victoria herself. How many people get a whole time period named after them? Linking from "Hysteria", Jonathan Pryce was in "Tomorrow Never Dies" with Judi Dench (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides").
THE PLOT: Queen Victoria is deeply depressed after the death of her husband, disappearing from public. Her servant Brown, who adores her, through caress and admiration brings her back to life, but that relationship creates a scandalous situation.
AFTER: Well, it seems as if at some point the balance of power got shifted to the common man. Most of the week I've been watching films about kings and queens who felt they could do anything (and anyone) that they wanted. Now that we've reached Victorian times, the Queen has to act a certain way, especially where matters of the heart are concerned. To be seen in a relationship with a commoner, well it just wouldn't be proper, now would it?
Maybe it's a male/female thing - Henry II expressed a penchant for sleeping with anything on two (or even occasionally four) legs, and people for the most part turned a blind eye. But when there's a queen on the throne without a king, it could be that she's held to a higher standard. Elizabeth I never got around to finding a suitable husband, and after Victoria's husband Albert died, she never re-married.
A bit of the history - Victoria became queen at the age of 18, she was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and the granddaughter of King George III (subject of "The Madness of King George"). Her mother was German-born, and Prince Albert, her husband, was also her first cousin (funny, that keeps happening...), and together they had 9 children and 34 grandchildren. She had the longest reign of any British monarch, and longer than any other female monarch in history.
While it's true that she had a manservant named John Brown, and rumors of a love affair circulated, I would imagine that no one knows exactly what the relationship was - so this film might be mainly conjecture. In fact, the movie itself actually falls short of defining the relationship, whether he was just the man who pulled her out of her depression, or whether he was the 2nd great love of her life. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between.
But it's worth noting that by this time, the monarchy held little power in Britain, so if the queen removed herself from government duties, or spent most of her time at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the Parliament ensured that the British Empire stayed in business.
This was a mostly entertaining film that focused on the (supposed) relationship between Victoria and John Brown, so it works mainly as a character study - the rugged Scotsman, with his love of the outdoors, turns out to have the recipe to cheer up the depressed Queen, with his recommended horse rides and salt-water swims in appropriate covered-up Queenly bathing gown, of course. By contrast, Brown prefers to dive into the surf au naturel.
He also becomes her trusted ally because of his frankness - she knows she can count on his opinion because, unlike everyone else around her, he has no reason to lie to feed her ego. This is a common concern, even in today's workplaces - is it better to tell the boss what you think he wants to hear, or is it better to speak the truth? And in fact, you may need to do the first thing for a while, and wait for the right opportunities to do the second.
Also starring Billy Connolly (last seen in "Gulliver's Travels"), Antony Sher (last seen in "The Wolfman"), Gerard Butler (last seen in "Law Abiding Citizen"), David Westhead, with a cameo from Oliver Ford Davies (who played Sio Bibble, adviser to Queen Amidala, in the Star Wars prequels).
RATING: 5 out of 10 stirrups (the other kind)
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