Cast: Judie Dench, Billy Connolly

Director: John Madden

Screenplay: Jeremy Brock

Running time: 1 hr 45 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


The outer palette of Mrs Brown is a gloomy, depressing drama in the shades of some Swedish miserablism in the vein of Ingmar Bergman. To think of it, if Bergman had made a British film, it would be this. A widow buried deep in grief even years after her husband’s passing, and seemingly, eternally clothed in black. Except that she’s Queen Victoria, the longest reigning monarch in British history to date, and despite of being followed by ladies and vexed by the politics of the time, she had self-barricaded in inconsolable mourning that, according to Benjamin Disraeli, she’s a sovereign “running a country 600 miles north of civilisation”. But John Madden, pre-Shakespeare in Love, makes sure the politics of the tale take a minor seat and injects some style to evade the all-consuming unhappiness of its protagonist. For Mrs Brown is really a poignant story of friendship amid all sense of loss, a provenance of calm in an eye of a storm – a factual account of the platonic relationship between HRH Vicky and her late-husband’s servant John Brown. The interplay between the two is remarkably observed, touching tender and graceful moments as its magnificent leads share an electrifying onscreen connection. And where would a British production be without Judi Dench? Her Victoria, at the onset, is a woman so pregnant with loss and enormous anguish that one can feel her piteous emotions emanating, and Dench portrays her with a deft combination of starchiness and brittleness, that at a single inopportune remark, she’d break down into a lament. She finds solace in her scenes with the brilliant Billy Connolly as the Scottish highlander, a stomping, barnstorming performance that blends muscle, humour and sensitivity.


VERDICT:

Not your mundane, bound-for-afternoon-telly royal costume drama. Mrs Brown makes for a compelling dissertation of grief and loss, and a friendship that can repair them. A compassionate picture delivered with richly nuanced performances by Dench and Connolly.



RATING: A-