Victoria & Abdul Cert PG 1hr 52mins
For the first 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, what is most notable about Victoria & Abdul is not how classy or well photographed it is but how broadly, even crudely, the comedy is being played. Honestly, there are moments early on when this is less the moving story of Queen Victoria’s last great love affair, more Carry On Up The Khyber.
Setting off at an almost indecent pace, director Stephen Frears, whose recent hits include Philomena and Florence Foster Jenkins, peppers his narrative with cheap gags about royal bowel movements, repeated references to ‘an incident with an elephant’ and the lack of medal-bearing trays at Windsor Castle. Even a wobbly and faintly phallic-looking jelly is played for laughs.
I don’t know about you but this was certainly not what I was expecting from a film that reunites Frears with the great Judi Dench and reunites Dench herself with the royal role that she last played 20 years ago in the Bafta-winning Mrs Brown.
For the first 20 minutes, what is most notable about Victoria & Abdul (starring Judi Dench and Ali Fazal, above) is not how classy it is but how broadly the comedy is being played
Yes, later on there are a couple of great speeches that could easily garner her more award nods, but those comedy undercurrents – and the feeling that Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall are over-pandering to a modern audience – never quite go away.
Would any homesick Indian servant of that era really say ‘Cut all the nicey, nicey c**p – let’s get the hell out of here’? Would any devout Muslim introduce his identically burka-clad wife and mother-in-law to the Queen before joking: ‘At least I think it’s that way round’? Well, they do here.
Slowly, however, a not uninteresting story emerges that begins in Agra in 1887, where local British dignitaries have decided that the Queen – who was also Empress of India, of course – should be presented with a special jubilee medal.
Knowing her penchant for tall men, two local civil servants have been selected, but following said incident with the elephant one has been replaced with someone shorter. Presumably on the grounds of comedy.
Slowly a not uninteresting story emerges that begins in Agra in 1887, where local British dignitaries have decided that the Queen should be presented with a special jubilee medal
But when the mismatched pair arrive in Britain, the taller and more handsome one – Abdul Karim (played by the tall and handsome Indian actor Ali Fazal) – almost instantly catches the world-weary eye of an ageing, overweight monarch who has been grieving for her beloved Albert for a quarter of a century and whose former favourite, John Brown, had died four years earlier.
Defying all royal protocol, Abdul not only makes direct eye contact with the Queen but falls to the ground to kiss her feet. Which goes down surprisingly well.
‘I suddenly feel a lot better,’ she announces, breaking into a smile for the first time in the film. Finally, we’re off with the story of the burgeoning relationship between monarch and servant very obviously echoing the arc of John Madden’s Mrs Brown from 1997, but without ever quite capturing its complexity and class. And for that it’s Lee Hall’s screenplay that must chiefly take the blame.
He may have found deserved fame for both Billy Elliot and War Horse but Hall is still relatively inexperienced when it comes to cinematic screenplays, and this feels like a step into the slight unknown for him.
Dench is totally convincing as the isolated monarch and she has excellent support from the Tim Pigott-Smith and Eddie Izzard. Fazal’s performance, in contrast, is a little one-dimensional
The lonely Queen apart – ‘everyone I have really loved is dead and I just go on and on and on’ – he offers little in the way of characterisation, and when the story needs to deepen, it doesn’t. Or not much.
The compensation, as we watch Victoria grow ever-more dependent on her devoted servant, is some very nice acting from a wonderful cast of top-class British character actors.
Dench, at 82, is 14 years older than Victoria would have been when Abdul arrived in Britain, but she’s totally convincing as the bored, isolated monarch who’s already in physical and emotional decline. ‘Look at me,’ she exclaims at one point, ‘a fat, lame, impotent, silly old woman.’
But, as Abdul is appointed her ‘Munshi’ and begins to teach her both Urdu and the Koran, it’s those supporting performances that catch the eye.
The late Tim Pigott-Smith, very touchingly, is the epitome of pomposity and befuddlement as Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s understandably miffed private secretary, but even better is an almost unrecognisable Eddie Izzard giving possibly the performance of his career as Bertie – the frustrated Prince of Wales and heir apparent, of course – who can’t believe that his mother is still alive, let alone so in thrall to an Indian servant.
Fazal’s performance, by comparison, is likeable but a little one-dimensional, though it has to be said he gets precious little help from the script.
The discovery that Abdul is a Muslim (until then it is blithely assumed he is Hindu) certainly gives the story a modern resonance (Prince Charles is famously fascinated by Islam), but at other points a certain weariness with another episode from Victoria’s currently much-chronicled life sets in, particularly in the light of an introductory caption: ‘Based on real events… mostly.’
But it’s funny and undemanding, and Dench is excellent. So while Victoria & Abdul does have its shortcomings, it’s also one of the films you’ll definitely want to see for yourself this autumn.
SECOND SCREEN
Mother! (18)
Rating: 
American Assassin (18)
Rating:
At the recent Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky’s new film, Mother!, definitely divided critics, picking up reviews ranging from five-star eulogies to one-star excoriations. I found myself subscribing to both views; one after the other.
The first half is surprising and rather good (although five stars would be pushing it) but the second half is a chaotic, indulgent and eventually rather disgusting mess.
Aronofksy unsettles us from the start with a shot of a woman apparently burning to death. Then he dazzles us as a derelict house is brought almost magically back to life before our eyes.
It is here than an unnamed young woman (Jennifer Lawrence) lives with her significantly older husband (Javier Bardem). Their agreed division of labour is that she will restore the house while he writes. But he’s blocked and can’t write a word. Their idyllic-looking relationship in this idyllic-looking house is beginning to crumble.
And then their first apparently uninvited guest (Ed Harris) arrives, closely followed by his direct and unsettlingly sexy wife (Michelle Pfeiffer). But does the husband really not know the newcomers? There seems to be a strange connection between them that the younger woman doesn’t understand and feels excluded by.
As the film reaches its midway point it starts to fall horribly apart. Babies are conceived, people die and still the strangers keep coming.
The result is an over-long and structurally repetitious film that might be about narcissism, the creative process or religion but which eventually becomes so unpleasant – and ridiculous – that I couldn’t be bothered to work it out.
American Assassin is another over-macho, unpleasantly violent misfire starring Dylan O’Drien (above) as a man who becomes a one-man counter-terrorism force after loosing his fiancée
Remember Stratton, the awful British thriller from a couple of weeks ago about stolen weapons of mass destruction? Well along comes American Assassin, which is markedly similar and almost as bad.
The only real differences being that this time the WMDs are nuclear rather than biological and our hero is trained by someone from special forces without being special forces himself. Oh, and it’s American, obvs.
It’s not helped by having one of those openings that echoes one of the terrorist horrors of real life – a machine-gun attack on a packed beach – all too realistically.
Having lost his fiancée in the attack, young Mitch Rapp (Maze Runner and Teen Wolf star Dylan O’Brien) turns himself into a one-man counter-terrorism force. Which suits the CIA fine, as they’d like Mitch to work for them after he’s been given some more training – from a somewhat improbably cast Michael Keaton.
The result is another over-macho, unpleasantly violent misfire.