Splendidly Done Historical Romance.

Rating: 7/10 (6 November 2016)

Emily Blunt is Victoria who, when her uncle dies, succeeds to the throne. Everyone figures her to be a passive leader. After all, she's just a kid, has no experience, and is a woman to boot.
Various august personages are vying for influence over her. Now, if this were an ill-considered movie, we'd have a robust feminist figure dressing down the Old Boy network and taking charge in no uncertain way.
But this is a a more savvy story than that. She's no will o' the wisp when it comes to decision making and even temper. She can throw a childish fit. But she needs a man, just as men of that stature need a wife, and she finds him in one of her less aggressive suitors, Prince Albert of Saxony, Coberg, and Ruritania. And, no, we don't get to see Prince Albert go to the can.
It's different from what you'd expect and its informative. (I, for one, never knew that Albert was shot in an assassination attempt.) Ordinarily, This kind of biopic takes us through to the inevitable end. As Ernest Hemingway once observed, every love story is a tragedy because at the end one of the lovers dies.
NOT HERE. We don't even follow Victoria and Albert into old age, just the first couple of years of their marriage. The last shot is of the two of them in bed, the smiling queen gently hugging the heroic Prince Consort or whatever he was. Their futures and their ends are given in a printed epilogue.
I liked it. Okay, so it ends happily instead of tragically, but these days, who needs more tragedy in his life? The location film is superlative. It will make you rufous with envy. It will coagulate your eyeballs. The ladies costumes are suitably muted but the men in uniform wear outrageous colors. Out of uniform they wear black suits with stylishly skinny shoulders. Most of the interiors have so many paintings they resemble the Louvre except for the dining rooms. They're all framed, tinged, and imbued with gilt and appointed with Louis XIV furniture and resemble Donald Trump's suite at Trump Towers.
Emily Blunt is a professional and convincing actress -- and in fact all the performances are at least adequate. She's also quietly pretty. It's not high drama, to be sure, but, again, I don't think I could take much more high drama without stroking out. It's a velvety narrative of romance and the exercise of power. You'll probably not be bored.