A touching, pleasing historical epic.

Rating: 8/10 (21 April 2010)

There's something about historical epics that make us movie fans flock to the movie theaters in raw expectation, and stop my beating heart if that historical epic were to be an accurate, well-researched and moving romance. What greater delight is there than watching a nice, good romance while learning a good portion of history, all enveloped in an exquisitely-crafted film? Jean-Marc Vallée's charming "The Young Victoria" skillfully lives up to the aforementioned characteristics, and creates a feel-good movie experience that has your heart guzzling and your mind racing in excitement throughout its entirety.
Yes, we love monarchs and their epic, larger-than-life experiences. One such monarch we all fondly remember is Queen Victoria, born in 1819 and assuming the throne at a very early age. King William (Jim Broadbent) is soon to die, Victoria is soon to come of age, and all around Europe rise interweaving conspiracies and plots to have Victoria sign an order of regency extending her powers to someone else and/or having someone seduce her with wit and modern political ideas and therefore influence her reign towards favoring a particular country or political party. But Victoria isn't as silly as everyone thinks, and she has a mind of her own...which is constantly been careened back and forth between diverging influences such as the Duchess of Kent's (Miranda Richardson) trying to make her renounce power to the evil Baron Stockmar, or Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) gaining her favour to help establish himself as Prime Minister...or Albert Conroy (Rupert Friend), King Leopold's nephew, who begins to fall in love with her while being part of a plot to earn the queen's protection of the Belgians.
Among all these conspiracies and mind-boggling plots is the shy, growing romance between Victoria and Albert. The film is about history, politics and the nature of regents, but above all these subjects the love these characters feel triumph above all else and end up in one of the best regencies England has ever seen and one of the best love stories ever told. Jean-Marc Vallée does a wonderful job in toning down the film to a light-hearted level, where the history is enjoyable and where the love story unfolding isn't stale and clichéd but original and refreshing. And Emily Blunt's performance as the young, strong-willed and charming Victoria is excellent and enthralling; she wins you over from the start and opens up Victoria's heart and mind to the audience, making it easy for us to love Victoria the Woman and to relate to her and her life problems, no matter how epically different they are from our own.
The screenplay is dazzling, such as we've come to expect from screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), and the film has that sublime, breath-taking, age-old beauty we can expect from lush, sweeping cinematography, mellow and inviting score and top-notch costume design. It's a film that doesn't depend on the acting, screen-writing or directing alone, but whose every part fit perfectly together into a pleasing, well-coordinated whole.
The film never lags, but sometimes it carries a particular emotion too far to the point where it loses it strength, or sometimes it cuts abruptly between scenes (and countries) in its attempt to fully involve us in every conspiracy or in every character's setting that we lose interest in most of the secondary characters and await impatiently to the flowering, letter-driven romance between Victoria and Albert. And what's with the rushed ending? You're enjoying the film, completely taken in by the story, and all of a sudden we get a black screen with an epilogue. It's not a grand flaw of the film, but it does inhibit it from becoming a masterpiece to rival such productions as "Shakespeare in Love" or "Elizabeth".
I highly recommend it! It's a crowd-pleaser that will make you smile.
Rating: 3 stars out of 4!