The Young Victoria is a simple story sumptuously told. What it lacks in intrigue and excitement, it makes up for in elegance and opulence. Its goal, quite simply, is to capture the human side of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, and it feels like truculent nit picking when The Young Victoria manages to do so much with so little.

The Young Victoria is one of those period pieces for which you need an encyclopedia to keep all the characters straight. The year is 1837 and King William (Jim Broadbent) is dying. Young Victoria (Emily Blunt), only 17, is in line for the throne and as such, the object of rapacious attention. While her overbearing mother (Miranda Richardson) and her ruthless advisor (Mark Strong) seek to control her every move, Victoria looks for ways to assert her independence. When her handsome Belgian cousin, Albert (Rupert Friend), visits the palace, it is obvious he’s been coached by her uncle, King Leopold, to win her hand and heart. While naturally defiant, Victoria nevertheless finds the young man to be a balm to everything prickly around her.

When King William dies and Victoria is crowned the Queen of England, she banishes those seeking to play her like a marionette and takes Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany), the Prime Minster, as her advisor. Soon, she discovers that ruling a country is as much about public relations as it is policy. When a relatively inconsequential decision sets the public against her, she turns to Albert for advice and comfort. The two are married shortly thereafter. But both are headstrong personalities, and Albert’s desire to rule beside her as an equal soon creates a rift in their union. As England slides further into discontent, Victoria must learn to trust her husband and his overwhelming desire to see her succeed.

In retrospect, The Young Victoria is not dense enough to warrant a filmic treatment (as opposed to, for instance, the reign of Elizabeth, popularized numerous times in Hollywood history). Here, the world is nipping at the heels of modernity and more than once we get the feeling that these players, powerful as they may be, are merely pawns play-acting at monarchy. Society is in the grip of the Industrial Revolution and the political machinations that formerly led to gory beheadings and nefarious palace intrigue are a thing of the medieval past. As such, the stakes in The Young Victoria do not resonate in the same way for individual characters or the realm itself. Yet despite all that, The Young Victoria remains an undeniable pleasure. Authentic and surprisingly relevant, the film is more concerned with issues of equality and gender, set incongruously in the gilded cage of pomp and pageantry.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée employs numerous (and unorthodox) cinemagraphic touches that elevate the film from stately costume drama to one of the most beautifully lensed projects all year. Ilan Eshkeri’s score soars with the same lavish extravagance, complementing the cinematography in the same way that Victoria and Albert complement each other.

Emily Blunt, as fine an actress as you will find among her generation, plays Victoria as both regal monarch and pent-up, feisty child. She captures a gratifying mix of remote superiority and naive impishness, offset agreeably by Friend’s shy, doting sincerity. Victoria and Albert’s is one of history’s few arranged marriages that spawned true love and devotion, and while The Young Victoria treads close to soap opera territory in the telling of their story, it is never over-indulgent. Theirs is a sumptuous love story, and director Vallée captures it in a hundred tiny moments of lavish attention to detail.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.