Not bad, but too much spinning around an empty center.

Rating: 5/10 (19 May 2011)

The Young Victoria is a love letter to the long-reigning monarch who largely defined what we think of as the British Empire. It looks sumptuous and features an array of pinpoint performances but is ultimately a case of biting off more than it can chew. There are simply too many things bouncing into each other in this story and some of them are far less interesting than the rest.
The film covers the time immediately surrounding Victoria's ascension to the throne in 1837, from her struggles to escape the infantilizing control of her mother and her mother's abusive lover to her infatuation with the great politician Lord Melbourne to her at times balky love with the eventual Price Albertand that's the problem. Any one of those stages in Victoria's life would have made an excellent movie. Throwing them all together in a movie that doesn't even last 2 hours produces a motion picture that can never be more than tantalizing at best and is a little dull at worst.
As it's presented here, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) and her dominating consort Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong) tried to brainwash the young Victoria (Emily Blunt) into becoming their easily manipulated vassal. The glimpses we get of the physical and intellectual limitations they enforced upon her to mold her mind and heart and Victoria's struggles to resist are interesting, but it's all done in too abbreviated a fashion.
Likewise, Victoria's platonic dependence on Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany), his efforts to use that for his political advantage and the awful consequences of that to Queen and country make up a fascinating look at 19th century British society, but nearly all of the important developments occur too quickly or too much off camera to build into anything.
And the love of Victoria and Albert (Rupert Friend) is a very well executed version of 19th century romance, where the lovers spend more time apart than together and whose love is more theoretical than actual. But the characters spend so little time together and Albert has so little to do with the rest of the film, the audience cannot invest the relationship with enough emotion to sustain its appeal.
The only thing that falls truly flat is the royal intrigue that surrounds Victoria and may very well reflect what happened around the real queen. In retrospect, however, it all seems silly and The Young Victoria doesn't recognize that. By this time in history, the monarchy still retained enormous informal power as the heart and soul of British life while the monarch was left with virtually no legitimate authority or genuine responsibility. That means all the plots and schemes that people may or may not have spun involving the Queen and her favor have nothing real to grab onto or stand upon.
For example, King Leopold (Thomas Kretschmann) of Belgium sought to use Albert as an agent of influence to win British support for his kingdom. Albert eventually refuses to go along, but what if he hadn't? What if Albert has sought to push Victoria into using British might to prop up Leopold? Even if Victoria had been taken in by such a plan, nothing would or could have come of it. No 19th century British parliament was going to spend coin or blood for a foreign sovereign because the queen would ask, command or beg. Queen Victoria's capacity to influence matters of state was practically nil and the same problem undermines all of the other palace machinations. We can now see that even if they were successful, it wouldn't have mattered.
Unlike The King's Speech, which also dealt with a great many different issues touching on the British throne a century after Victoria's coronation, this production has no central, animating core providing a dramatic structure and direction. This certainly isn't a bad film, but it's only able to walk and you keep expecting it to run. If you like British period pieces, you'd surely enjoy this one. If those kind of movies leave you cold, The Young Victoria won't warm you up.