The Young Victoria
The Young Victoria wants to offer two overlapping narratives about Queen Victoria's coming-of-age. On the one hand, it represents Victoria as a potentially powerful woman, but one easily manipulated by a handsome slick talker like Lord Melbourne; on the other hand, it transforms Victoria's relationship with Albert into a conflict between political necessity and idealized true love. Melbourne and Albert become rival suitors for Victoria, one for self-interested political reasons, the other for love--even though Albert, in turn, must fight off Leopold of Belgium's own political investment in the marriage. In that sense, The Young Victoria imagines a royal family that is simultaneously absolutely private (because based in pure love) and absolutely public (because that love helps stabilize the nation).
This conflict between politics, as embodied in a politician on the make, and love, as embodied by the disinterested devotion of some man or woman, has animated a number of royal biopics in the past couple of decades. Usually, politics tends to win, but only incidentally: the monarch draws strength from love, then must sacrifice it on the altar of public duty (which benefits the politician, but isn't for him). We see this struggle at work in both of the Elizabeth films, for example, as well as in Mrs. Brown; there's also a slightly more complex and ironic version at work in The Madness of King George (where the King implicitly sacrifices Greville in order to save his image). In The Young Victoria, the Queen must abandon her improper passion for Melbourne because it contaminates what ought to be an apolitical space. Thus, the Bedchamber Crisis shows Victoria dangerously confusing emotional attachments with the demands of political patronage: although she complains to Peel that she ought to be in charge of her own household, all of her ladies were actually appointed by Melbourne, meaning that the "private" and the "political" have become dangerously entangled. For her ladies to be all Whigs during a Whig government was not the problem; for them to be all Whigs under a Tory government, however, was a very different matter. By so openly taking Melbourne's side, the Queen undermines her status as a national symbol, even as she also refuses to acknowledge that she is such a symbol--and so must relinquish at least some of her private desires accordingly. Melbourne becomes even more dangerous because he represents party politics, not the national interest; we see the first signs of the Queen's ability to distinguish between the two when she demands him to produce a detailed account of the state of the poor. In fact, Melbourne's politics seem entirely vapid (or, at least, they seem to be about Melbourne).
Unlike those biopics in which private romance must be sacrificed to public duty, though, The Young Victoria turns the romance into the nation's salvation. To do that, though, it necessarily ramps up the political conflicts involved: Victoria, although indeed disinclined to marry when she and Albert met, certainly had no illusions about either the need to get married or the backstage negotiations involved, and King Leopold (who promoted the marriage) was not exactly some sinister mastermind. (One wouldn't know from this film that Victoria's relationship with her uncle was of the sort that later involved requests for some favorite goodies.) Victoria and Albert only marry when both realize that they love each other, thereby rejecting the politicking that pushed them together in the first place. Albert, of course, is also far more suitable than Melbourne because he is interested in the public welfare--signaled early on by his assumption that the British ought to be concerned about British interests. Once married, Albert promptly sets out on a modernizing spree, insisting on clean windows (shocking!), orderly finances, and a streamlined household. English "tradition" thus gets a healthy injection of German organization. After some quarreling and an invented wound (the shooting incident is real, Albert's injury is not), the married couple finally come to an egalitarian agreement about how they will share their power, with apparently beneficial results to all concerned--or so the end titles cheerfully inform us.
For these conjoined stories to work, the film obviously needs to paper over some of the historical details. There's no mention, for example, of how much practical power the real Albert managed to wield--or, for that matter, of how much the Queen wanted him to wield. (Which is why, no doubt, we hear nothing of her push to get him appointed King Consort.) Similarly, a moderately contrite Melbourne tells Victoria that she must get rid of her former governess, the Baroness Lehzen, in order to consolidate her relationship with Albert--a moment that simultaneously marks the end of Melbourne's dominant power over Victoria, the true end of Victoria's childhood, and the renewal of Victoria's marriage on fully adult terms. But, in fact, it was Albert who got rid of the Baroness, whom he passionately disliked. More to the point, the film has to carefully avoid Victoria's own feelings about women's roles and the budding feminist movement, as the former were resoundingly traditional and the latter resoundingly negative. While Victoria certainly expressed sympathy (sometimes practical) for women who were badly treated, she was impatient (at best) with the women's movement. As she notoriously declared in one letter, it was necessary to stop "this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights'" at all costs.1
Interestingly enough, even as the film conjures up a proto-feminist monarch, it also wholeheartedly endorses the image of a simultaneously spectacular and domesticated royal family that originated with George III, temporarily detoured with George IV and William IV, and then resurged full force with Victoria and Albert.2 On the one hand, we have a passionate love affair; on the other, the Queen's coronation and the business of her regular public appearances. Certainly, the end titles seem to suggest that--the sad and early end to the marriage besides--Victoria and Albert had a happy, productive marriage (in both senses of the term...), entirely beneficial to the national good. I don't know if the filmmakers intend to comment on the current state of monarchical affairs, but the "and they lived happily ever after as good rulers, or at least until Albert died" conclusion seems to suggest that Victoria and Albert maintained that image in a way that the Windsors have not.
The film itself is often quite charming, if rather meandering, and benefits from strong performances by Emily Blunt as the determined young Queen and Rupert Friend as an almost fairy-tale Prince Albert. (Friend has also been successfully made up to look like Albert.) By a weird twist of casting fate, Mark Strong, who plays Lord Blackwood in the new Sherlock Holmes film, also crops up here as the resident villain, Sir John Conroy. (No bird familiars this time, though.) Paul Bettany dapperly oozes insincerity as Lord Melbourne, while Harriet Walter offers up substitute-maternal advice as the Dowager; Jim Broadbent, meanwhile, is virtually unrecognizable in William IV's wig. As this is a costume film, there are of course many pretty dresses to look at, a number of them recognizable from Victoria's portraits, and alert viewers will catch the brief allusions to George Hayter's coronation portraits and H. T. Wells' famous painting.
1 The redacted name in Strachey's quotation is Lady Amberley. Molly Youngkin is correct, I think, in identifying Victoria's beliefs with the "conservative feminism"--emphasizing woman's moral power in the domestic sphere--of authors like Mrs. Ellis; see Feminist Realism at the Fin-de-Siecle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman's Press on the Development of the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007), 9.
2 As Linda Colley comments of George III: "At one and the same time, Britons were being invited to see their monarch as unique and as typical, as ritually splendid and remorselessly prosaic, as glorious and gemutlich both." Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 232. On the literary and cultural conflicts over Victoria's image, see, e.g., Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and Victorian Culture, 1837-1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Gail Turley Houston, Royalties: The Queen and Victorian Writers (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1999). On the further permutations of the Queen's image in Victorian advertisements, see Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 85-95.