Film review: The Young Victoria

(PG)

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Running time: 104 minutes

***

YOUNG Victoria is a pleasant film with two attractive leads – and if you think this sounds like a rather restful evening at the cinema, that's because Young Victoria is like watching a rapturous paperback romance moored by characters with real-world problems.

Until the late Thirties, the Crown refused to allow any dramatisation dealing with Victoria to be presented within the empire, and this film retains some of this reverence. A prisoner of her position in Kensington Palace, Victoria the teenager (Emily Blunt) is under tremendous pressure from her mother's close friend, courtier Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), to surrender her powers to him, and the first quarter of the film presents, in unsparing detail, the minutiae of royal etiquette and the young queen's frustration with social rules that forbid her from walking downstairs unaccompanied.

A life that is that sheltered in posh surroundings can only lead to mistakes, especially an early friendship with prime minister Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany), which precipitates what was titillatingly known as The Crisis Of The Bedchamber. When Melbourne resigns, Victoria refuses to replace his cronies in the royal household with Tory ones. This forces his opponent, Robert Peel, to resign himself, leading the way for Melbourne's return.

Despite Bettany's gallantry, Melbourne gets shoved aside when Prince Albert (Rupert Friend) rides into town. Albert is shy, sweet and has cheekbones you could slice cheese on, but Julian Fellowes' script vainly tries to generate a will they/won't they tease by stranding Albert in Germany. There he stares out of windows like a boneless basset, fervently hoping the next delivery of the pony express mail from Blighty will carry an ardent expression of affection from Vic.

Playing Queen Victoria has largely been the prerogative of dames such as Anna Neagle, Sybil Thorndike and Judi Dench, but Emily Blunt, a discreetly foxy, healthier version of Keira Knightley, brings an appealing vigour to the teen monarch, even though The Young Victoria hasn't much psychology to speak of. If anything, there's a reluctance to pull together the most obvious threads – such as the fact that in the absence of the Duke of Kent, who died when she was just eight months old, Victoria seemed fatefully keen on securing a father figure.

Eventually even the film gets spooked by its own tentativeness. Towards the end, apparently uncertain whether Victoria and, more importantly, the Young Victoria audience have grasped that Albert fancies the Queen rather than her position, there's a scene where poor Albert literally takes a bullet for his wife.

Once you've stopped sniggering at one of the worst bits of historical invention since Braveheart brought in tartan several centuries early and woad several centuries late, you may remind yourself that – of course – Martin Scorsese is one of the film's producers. Otherwise, this is a film of polished niceness, wholesome enough to take home to mother.

• On general release from Friday