VICTORIA & ABDUL

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

It can be fun to hear untold stories about hugely famous historical figures, and in the case of Queen Victoria, it was only revealed within the past decade that her close friendship with a Muslim Indian man had been kept secret for over a century.

To call this a juicy story would be an understatement, and that's what makes the film adaptation of Victoria & Abdul somewhat disappointing. One can only presume the book of the same name on which it's based, by Shrabani Basu, gets into much more depth. For the movie, director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Philomena) turns it into little more than a pleasant diversion. And there is a lot to mine in a story like this, considering the story begins only three decades into Britain's rule over India, and the context of overt racism of the British toward South Asians.

Queen Victoria is the one person in her house who not only doesn't seem to care that Abdul isn't white or Christian -- she even enlists him to teach her his native language of Urdu -- but is largely ignorant of the geopolitical details behind the racial resentments among her household staff, or among the rest of her country for that matter.

A lot of this is touched on in Victoria & Abdul, but it is also largely glossed over, in favor of telling this amusing "opposites attract" story. Within that context, Frears offers something fairly entertaining, but fails to impress upon the audience how historically significant this really was. The tone is very "isn't it funny this happened!" rather than demonstrating how extraordinary it was, both that it happened, and that Victoria's successor, her son, King Edward VII, nearly succeeded in scrubbing Abdul completely from the historical record.

But, I suppose there's another approach you could take with this film. It's telling a story not yet told on film, at least, and a unique one at that. It gets a tad corny at times ("Based on true events ... mostly," we are told at the beginning), and with a different approach it could have been much more profound. Still, the performers elevate the material.

How can anyone resist Judi Dench as Queen Victoria -- twenty years after she played the same character in Mrs. Brown, also about another scandalous relationship with a servant? Dench is now 82 years old and is as commanding a screen presence as ever. Ali Fazal, as Abdul, is plenty convincing as the exotic man who charmed the queen. And it's a treat as always to see Eddie Izzard, here playing her son Bertie with unusual subtlety.

I do wish Frears did more to unpack the gender politics of a Muslim man fawning over a British queen in the 19th century, while the wife and mother-in-law the queen insisted he bring out from India spend all their time in burqas. That was a bit too heavy for the tone Frears was going for, though, so Abdul's family is just regarded as exotic curiosities rather than figures of cultural misogyny. I guess racial prejudice and classism were enough for Frears to tackle -- and even there only superficially.

Realistically, the criticisms I have for Victoria & Abdul are not going to be on the minds of most people actually bothering to watch it. This is the kind of movie that makes it easy for viewers to convince themselves they can feel good about how much progress has been made since the time of its setting, and admire the independent streak of an unusual woman in power. In much the same vein but to far less a degree than Gone with the Wind, it gets more problematic the deeper you dig but within the context of undeniably compelling storytelling.

Judi Dench and Ali Fazal are an internationally platonic odd couple in Victoria & Abdul.

Overall: B