Mark Steyn on the 2017 movie Victoria & Abdul:
As I mentioned on the radio yesterday, May 24th 2019 marks the bicentennial of Queen Victoria. So it would seem appropriate to have a bit of cinematic Victoriana for our Saturday movie date. Her Majesty was an important and consequential figure in almost every corner of the world, and once upon a time the biopics reflected that. But she was to a degree unknown and unknowable, which offers great opportunities to the contemporary biographical sensibility. And so the most notable films of the last two decades belong to a sub-genre of their own: the Queen-Empress and the men who caught the eye of a lonely and isolated woman in the long decades of her widowhood. John Madden’s Mrs Brown (1997) is about the Queen’s relationship with her ghillie; Stephen Frears’ Victoria & Abdul (exactly twenty years later, 2017) is about the Queen’s relationship with her munshi.
Queen Victoria (1819-1901) portrait by Bassano, 1882.
Photo via Wikimedia CommonsIf you don’t know what a ghillie is, well, it’s a Scots Gaelic word for a Highland chief’s attendant on a fishing or hunting trip. If you don’t know what a munshi is, hey, relax: Nobody in the Royal Household does either, and so they’re a little taken aback to find that a Hindu waiter brought over to add a bit of imperial exotica to the Golden Jubilee in 1887 has suddenly been promoted to the hitherto unknown position of “Munshi and Indian Clerk to the Queen-Empress”.
A court favorite is always resented by less-favored courtiers – for whatever reason suffices. In Mrs Brown (the below-stairs mocking name for her ghillie-smitten Majesty), the favorite, John Brown, is resented for being a big brawny bit of Highland rough. In Victoria & Abdul, which begins four years after the Highland fling’s sudden death, the new favorite, Abdul Karim, is resented because his insinuating Moghul and Persian airs are regarded as ludicrously above his station.
Yet they all get what’s going on: As one lady-in-waiting at Balmoral titters, Abdul is “the brown John Brown”.
To confirm that we are in the realm of sequel, the Queen in both films is played, splendidly and sympathetically, by Judi Dench, and the supporting characters are largely identical, too – from Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary, to her long-serving Lady of the Bedchamber, Lady Churchill. As in Mrs Brown, the latter screenplay is disfigured by solecisms. In the earlier film, the script cannot quite decide whether the Private Secretary is “Sir Henry” or “Mr Ponsonby”. In the sequel, Judi Dench sighs that, “I have almost a billion citizens” – not a sentence she would ever have uttered: she had almost a billion subjects – and, as wily old Éamon de Valera would later remark in another context, the concept of “citizenship” was all but unknown in the British Empire. One of her last major legislative acts was to give Royal Assent to the Australian constitution – which she found to be in very poor taste, as the word “Commonwealth” reminded her of Oliver Cromwell.
