VICTORIA AND ABDUL (Stephen Frears). 112 minutes. Opens Friday (September 29). See listing. Rating: NNN
Victoria And Abdul offers up the chance to see Judi Dench play Queen Victoria two decades after her Oscar-nominated performance in Mrs. Brown.
This time, her aged, listless monarch is jolted back to life by a young Indian clerk named Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) who comes to England to present her with a ceremonial token of colonial pride. Intrigued, Victoria takes the man under her wing, learning Urdu, reading the Koran and decorating a castle room in an Indian style, much to the chagrin of her advisers.
Deftly directed by Stephen Frears, the film – written by Billy Elliot’s Lee Hall – is funnier than you might expect. The opening sequence alone is a mini masterpiece of pacing. And Dench gets to show enormous range.
But I can’t help thinking that if frequent Frears collaborator Peter Morgan had penned it there’d be a more serious look at colonialism and race. Abdul has a cynical sidekick (the hilarious Adeel Akhtar) who raises some issues, but the film never lets us see why Abdul admires Victoria, and that creates an uncomfortable imbalance.