Stephen Frears (Philomena, The Queen) goes for the grey pound once again with this well-meaning tale of the unlikely intergenerational friendship between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench, regal as ever and clearly having a blast) and an Indian servant named Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal). Abdul is “the tallest man here” and so is shipped from Agra to England to present Her Majesty with a ceremonial coin in celebration of the golden jubilee. “I thought the tall one was terribly handsome,” says the Queen, and so Abdul is promoted from bearer of wobbling royal jellies (the symbolism isn’t lost on me) to her personal footman and, eventually, her “munshi” or spiritual guide.
Dench’s Victoria learns “Indian” (Urdu is deemed more queenly than “Hindustani”), while an enthusiastic Abdul teaches her about the joys of mangoes and the spiritual significance of carpets. (“Life is like a carpet; we weave in and out to make a pattern,” he says.) “She’ll be wearing a burqa next,” mutters Lord Salisbury (Michael Gambon).
Dench is captivating as the cantankerous queen, but Fazal isn’t able to flesh out Abdul, who is thinly sketched on the page. An asexual “Uncle Tom” crawling up “the stinky, creaking ladder of the shitty British empire”, according to friend and comic foil Mohammed (Adeel Akhtar). The film takes great pains to absolve Victoria of colonial responsibility, painting her, bizarrely, as tolerant and reviled for it. “I’m hated all over the world and here,” she insists, describing herself as a “fat, lame, silly, impotent old woman” hankering “to be oneself and live a simple, rudimentary life”. This kind of historical revisionism is a stretch that, at best, works as a cute royalist fantasy and, at worst, dresses up its endorsement of colonialism and empire as something progressive.
