Delayed Reaction: The Young Victoria

Premise: It’s Queen Victoria…when she was young.

 

I’m having trouble mentally categorizing this film. Watching it feels like discovering a buried movie. I immediately want to treat it like a Wild Target, Lullaby for Pi, Creation, or The Guard, which I assure you are all movies from the same era with lots of people you’ve heard of, including people in The Young Victoria. These are “time filler” or “favor” movies people do because they’d rather keep working than dawdle or because a friend asked them to do it. It’s really not one of those though. It’s an Oscar nominee winner (for Costume Design). It was produced by Martin Scorsese among others. It was written by Julian Fellows (right before Downton Abbey) and directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (before Dallas Buyers Club). And obviously the cast is strong. It’s rather hard to make a period piece with a decent budget that can’t convince some good Brits to take part.

 

So, The Young Victoria is an accomplished movie that feels like a forgotten relic. That’s definitely my take on it. I have nothing against the movie. It’s just, kind of dull. I know that’s a lazy critique. It’s also an indicative one. “Dull” is what you call a movie when it doesn’t engage you. A movie isn’t actively dull. Dull is the result. Emily Blunt and some lovely costumes weren’t enough to overcome how disengaged I was throughout the movie. Even though I know who all the actors are, I still couldn’t keep track of who most of them were in relation to Victoria. I wasn’t invested in Victoria’s relationship with Rupert Friend’s Prince Albert. In fact, I definitely ducked away long enough to see if that Prince Albert had anything to do with another famous Prince Albert (Note: He does not, and I was not prepared for Wikipedia to have so much NSFW content).

 

I sound more negative on the movie than I really am. That’s the problem with neutral movies. I struggle to find much to say about them, so it turns into a rant about why I think they made no impression. This is certainly way to fill 1h45m.

 

Side Rant: That does remind me. Emily Blunt feels too old to be cast in this role, right? She was 25 or 26 at the time and being asked to play a teenager for some or most of the movie. There are many actors who play teens into their late 20s. A rare few can even pull it off into their 30s. Blunt just isn’t one of them. She has always been an adult. She has a perpetual 30-year-old look. Like, she could play the same roles now that she could in 2006, but they do read as older than young Victoria. This wasn’t that distracting in the movie. There were just a couple times when they mentioned her age that gave me pause.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend