The Young Victoria

In what could have been titled "The Unknown Victoria," this film illuminates the early years -- late teens, early twenties -- of the young Princess and early Queen Victoria. The average moviegoer will have only the image of the very portly older widow Victoria; the pert, young, pretty Emily Blunt (most memorable in The Devil Wore Prada) is a far cry from the cliched Victoria. But it is to the credit of director Jean-Marc Vallee and the Oscar-heralded screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) that the actress, while exhibiting the insecurities of a vulnerable princess under the imperious dominion of a controlling mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), and her manipulative lover Conroy (Mark  Strong) yet projects the incipient qualities of a strong, imperial presence, the future Empress of India.

While hardly a trenchant psychological profile of Victoria or her almost immediately beloved Prince Albert (Rupert Friend), the film avoids the appealingly easy and melodramatic pitfalls that could pretend to define Victoria's life: the fretful fight for powerful mommy's love; the intoxicating "courtship" of the attractive Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany); the world-shaking succession to the crown; the dream marriage to Albert; the birth of the first several (of nine) children.

Rather, with history as a not overdrawn backdrop, a young woman struggles to emerge and, though in a powerful position, fights seduction by others drawn to her position and finds a soulmate (even though he is conveniently the nephew of her uncle the King of the Belgians (Thomas Kretschmann.) We see family tensions -- after all, Victoria is not just Albert's wife, but also his Queen. While we are never unaware of the royal  overtones, these are truly people that Fellowes draws and Vallee frames.

The director does so with delicacy and a light touch. Jim Broadbent is a tetchily credible King William IV, angry at being denied the presence at court of his loving niece by her mother; Paul Bettany is a benignly scheming Prime Minister who actually cares for his Queen; and especially Rupert Friend who brings fire and ice to his Prince Consort role.

There is a slight awkwardness at the film's closing in that the sole emphasis on the early years of "young Victoria" requires several scrawled minutes across the screen embracing more than the next fifty years of royal history, filling us in on the rest of Victoria's life: the other children, the early, tragic death of the enormously popular Albert at 42, the spread of the 'Empire," etal.

Nevertheless, god save "The Young Victoria."

                                             Howard Buck