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Judi Dench and Ali Fazal forge an unlikely friendship in the tame heritage flick Victoria and Abdul |
The fundamental events of Victoria & Abdul are true.
There was a man called Abdul Karim – and Victoria did raise him from servant to
a confidant. He did cause conflict in the royal household and was finally sent
back to India after her death, after surrendering most of his papers. But Victoria
& Abdul repackages this friendship into a cosy, Sunday-afternoon
entertainment, bereft of depth. And carefully works on the rough surfaces to
make the story smooth and easy to digest.
The film is clearly trying to ape the success of Mrs
Brown – a far more intelligent and emotionally complex (if similarly
heritage) film that looked at Victoria’s previous all-consuming friendship with
a male servant, John Brown. But that film didn’t close its eyes to the negatives
of such relationships, as this one does. It made clear royal attention can be
fickle – and being elevated above others can help make you your own worst
enemy. In that film, after a honeymoon, the friendship declines into one of
residual loyalty but reduced affection. It’s a realistic look at how we might
lean on someone at times of grief, but separate ourselves from them later. Victoria
& Abdul takes only one lesson from Mrs Brown: that a close bond
between monarch and commoner is heart-warming.
The film in general is in love with the idea that if the
Queen could only speak directly to her people, the world would be a better
place. It presents a Victoria stifled by court procedure who knows very little
about her empire and is constrained by the courtiers around her. It wants us to
think that if the Queen took direct rule, she’d be kinder, wiser and more
humane. That this figurehead symbol could craft a better British Empire if she
was an absolute monarch.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. This romantic view of
“Victoria the Good” is comforting stuff, but undermined even within the film by
our introduction to the Queen at a royal dinner, where Victoria stuffs food
down herself so quickly that mountains of untouched food goes uneaten on the
plates of the other diners (as all plates are removed the moment she is
finished). And despite being told that the Koh-i-noor diamond was stolen by the
British (to her surprise), she still doesn’t think twice about wearing it later
in the film while in the midst of her Indian passion. And while the real
Victoria loathed the racist attitudes of some at her court, she still clearly
sees herself as a paternalistic mother figure for India, which could of course
never be able to make its own decisions about things.
Not that the film is interested in tackling more complex
ideas of the position of India and its independence. It’s similarly confused by
Abdul himself. In a more interesting film, Abdul would have been partly naïve
servant and partly charming rogue. He very carefully spins an invented story of
himself as a teacher and thinker (he’s actually a clerk from a fabric office)
and it would have been interesting to see his building of a relationship with
Victoria at least partly being based on self-gain. He certainly gains an awful
lot from her – from his own carriage on her train to a home and his own
servants. It would have been possible to have this side of him and still have his
loyalty and friendship to the Queen being genuine. But it’s too much for the
film to tackle.
An Abdul who was consciously playing a role of exotic
thinker might have come across as a scam-artist – but would have given the film
a lot more to play with, when the royal court is full of people positioning and
presenting themselves for influence. Adeel Ahktar’s fellow-servant Mohammed
even suggests in one scene that this is what Abdul is doing – and good luck to
him. But the film is scared that this could be seen as endorsing the court’s fears
about Abdul. So the character is neutered into nothing: he becomes exactly the
sort of empty “exotic”, free of opinion and character, that filled out the
extras list of a 1940s epic. He has no agency, never makes any decision or
expresses any opinion. And his feelings for Victoria are presented as totally
genuine which, combined with his foot kissing, turns him into someone who looks
and feels really servile.
This is because the film wants to tell the story of a
perfect friendship, with the British upper classes as the hissible baddies
(never mind that no one is more upper class than Victoria). Never mind that
Abdul’s action will indirectly condemn Mohammed to death in the British climate
– or that while Abdul rises, Mohammed becomes his servant, still consigned to
sleeping on the floor of his railway carriage. We learn nothing about Abdul.
How did this clean-living saint become riddled with the clap? Why did he die so
young? Did he really think nothing of the riches and honours Victoria showered
him with? We don’t have a clue.
Instead the film keeps it simple with goodies (Victoria and
Abdul) and baddies (almost everyone else). The most politically astute
character, Mohammed, disappears and never allows things to get unpleasant.
Jokes of the courtiers standing around aghast saying things like “Now he’s
teaching her Urdu” are repeated multiple times. They’re fun, but it
substitutes for dealing with the real issues.
It all has the air of ticking boxes. Frears’ direction is
brisk, efficient and free of personality. Dench is great, but she could play
this role standing on her head while asleep. Pigott-Smith (in his final role)
is fine but Farzal has nothing to work with and Izzard provides a laughable
pantomime role of lip-smacking villainy as the future Edward VII. The finest
performance – handling the most interesting material – is from Ahktar. He’s the
only character who seems to place what we see here in any form of context.
Other than that, this film is just a string of very comforting heritage ideas,
thrown together with professionalism but a total lack of inspiration.
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