Victoria & Abdul (2017)

Stephen Frears returns to the Victorian court with the solemnity of a man polishing silverware nobody asked him to polish. Victoria & Abdul pairs Judi Dench's widowed monarch with Ali Fazal's Abdul Karim, an Agra clerk dispatched to present a gold coin and promptly installed as a Munshi, Urdu tutor, and surrogate son. The film's most notable structural choice is placing a South Asian Muslim protagonist at the center of a British heritage drama, a genre that usually reserves such figures for the wallpaper. Fazal carries it with patience. The camera notices him. The court does not, and that friction is the engine.

The household's snobbery toward Abdul drives the drama, and the film lets us watch Salisbury and Bertie scheme with the quiet horror of men protecting upholstery. Whether this amounts to an interrogation of empire or a soft-focus apology for it is the argument critics had, and the argument is fair. The film recovers a genuinely buried story, the burning of Abdul's letters and the erasure of his name from the record, and that recovery has value. Victoria's stubbornness against her male courtiers registers as temperament, not thesis. She is lonely. She is a queen. She is not a manifesto.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No environmental anxieties trouble the Durbar Room. No economic critique disturbs the jewel vault. Nobody's relationship to their body is examined. No neurodivergent characters appear. Eddie Izzard is present, and that is the extent of the queer content, which is to say there is none. The film gestures at colonial prejudice and then hands out another cup of tea. It preaches gently, if at all. A handsome, well-tailored thing, and about as dangerous as a postcard.