Victoria and Abdul

Film (2017)

With Judi Dench (Queen Victoria), Ali Fazal (Abdul Karim), Tim Pigott-Smith (Sir Henry Ponsonby), Eddie Izzard (Bertie, Prince of Wales), Adeel Akhtar (Mohammed), Michael Gambon (Lord Salisbury), Paul Higgins (Dr. Reid), Olivia Williams (Lady Churchill), Fenella Woolgar (Miss Phipps), Julian Wadham (Alick Yorke), Robin Soans (Arthur Bigge), Ruth McCabe (Mrs. Tuck), Simon Callow (Puccini), Sukh Ojla (Mrs. Karim)

At a ceremony celebrating India as a colony of Britain, young Abdul Harin (Ali Fazal) comes to Britain and meets the Queen (Judi Dench) who is taken with him and engineers a way for him to stay on in her employ. So follows an extraordinary period of years during which Abdul becomes a teacher and confidant of the Queen much to the dismay and chagrin of the members of her court who oppose the connection, due principally to racism. Nonetheless, Victoria fights to preserve her relationship with Abdul. Practically everyone in her attendance, including her son Bertie (Eddie Izzard), the Prince of Wales who will eventually become King Edward VIII, opposes Abdul’s close influence upon her. Her retinue is filled with weirdos of one sort or another, led by the not so young playboy Bertie and a lot of equally strange courtiers.

Judi Dench’s next big acting frontier may be the Sears catalog, which, if past experience of her versatility and capability is any guide, she would present with conviction, verve and inspiration. The woman is amazing and manages to bring gusto and spice to just about everything she touches.

Here she does a fabulous job of conveying the complexities of being the aged Queen Victoria – widowed, powerful, revered but also strangely isolated and held in isolation by a court full of stuck up types who can’t seen to allow her to live.

The film is adept at conveying this weird life of established queenhood – the courtiers practically drag the queen out of bed in order to get her dressed, do her hair and get her day started. It’s heartbreaking. But, even in the such of such mistreatment, the Queen, via Dench, gives such a strong and compelling sense of who she is there’s no room for feeling that she’s a lame and fickle old goose who’s over the hill. Just the opposite.

The interchanges with Abdul are delightful and generally quite funny. There is also Mohammed (Adeel Akhtar), Abdul’s Indian sidekick, who grouses and groans endlessly about England. The script wittily gives him every opportunity to comment about “uncivilized” British life and diet. Akhtar as Mohammed does a splendid job of being endlessly irritated and complaining in an amusing way, making it all fun until his part turns more dramatic.

Simon Callow has a great turn as a singing Puccini – boy is his singling bad – but it is very funny.

Director Stephen Frears has a long resume and has directed all sorts of things, and here makes good use of his big star to tell this interesting story about racism in the nineteenth century.

The expansive and lush score by Thomas Newman is robust and lyrical when need be and plain amusing at other times.

The cast is populated with interesting actors of one stripe or other. Olivia Williams, who memorably played the third part of the triangle in Wes Anderson’s early masterpiece Rushmore, plays a totally different kind of character here, a really uptight lady in waiting who is ready to assassinate every good feeling. Michael Gambon weighs in, as does Tim Pigott-Smith, so well known for his expertly and chillingly villainous role in BBC’s The Jewel in the Crown several decades ago; sadly Pigott-Smith died in the wake of the filming – this was one of his last roles.

– BADMan