THE YOUNG VICTORIA (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jean-Marc Vallée
Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany,
Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent,
Thomas Kretschmann, Jesper Christensen
Unlike "Bright Star", 2009's other tall-hat romance, the love story in this movie has a happy ending, with Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, ruling England for more than 20 years as one of history's most famously devoted couples. Victoria lived and ruled a lot longer than that, but this is the story of her life as a young woman, a smart, severely protected teenaged princess in the process of becoming a queen. Like its heroine, the movie's surprisingly lively, and with an efficient script and a running time of 105 minutes, it's over before you're quite ready to let these lovers go. There's at least one distracting dolly shot and a few quick freeze frames that feel out of place in a movie set in the first half of the 19th century. But Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend are believably human as the royal couple, compelled by protocol and their unique circumstances to play their roles just so. Every once in a while, one of these romantic period pieces transcends its posh setting and high-end production values and gets the emotional stuff just right. That's what happens here.
