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MRS BROWN (1997)
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Grief is a prison whose bars are invisible and indissoluble, and when it descends on a person in power, the gloom spreads outward, for she with resolute unconsciousness bends her surroundings into her gloom. Few personal griefs shaped culture more than Queen Victoria's (Judi Dench, The Importance of Being Earnest), for when her beloved Albert died in December, 1861, she donned the heavy black mourning and white lace cap that she wore for the rest of her life, and whose visual repressiveness defined the late Victorian age. More importantly, though the head of state, queen and empress, for the next five years she was in a state of profound depression -- until John Brown (Billy Connolly, Lemony Snicket), Scottish ghillie and favorite servant of Prince Albert, whose arrival leading the Queen's favorite riding pony opens this engaging and deeply sympathetic film.
Brown is a Highlander, a loudmouth, a martinet, a rough-hewn knockabout Scotsman, and a man who speaks his mind. Upon being presented he blurts to her, "Honest to God, I never thought to see you in such a state. You must miss him dreadfully," and at that last and purely personal word Victoria's icy reserve trembles, then cracks as she near-hysterically orders him out. The next morning, there he stands on the south lawn, holding the pony and refusing to move until directly ordered by the queen's private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby (the exquisitely presentable Geoffrey Palmer, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin).
Brown is a belligerent contradiction, who can in the same breath be both sweetly gentle and roughly insubordinate to his Queen, yet always emotionally right. Bit by bit he coaxes Victoria out of her house and into the saddle, out of her shell and into the ocean, out of her grief and into a smile, and then a laugh, and thence back into public life. Though infinitely solicitous and soft to her -- a Queen Whisperer with a salt-and-pepper beard -- he is rude, crude and unattractive below-stairs, a kiss-up-kick-down who upsets the established order. Flaunting his indifference to potential rebuke or dismissal, his trampling disregard for conventional forms, like a dare-you chip on his shoulder, he positively delights in bluntness. "I think you should go now," he peremptorily dismisses the Prince of Wales at one stage, "you've bothered your mother enough," and when Bertie protests, he adds, "Are you deaf as well as stupid?" to which the future Edward VII can only splutter around his fox-red muttonchops.
As with Helen Mirren's tough-as-her-Wellingtons Queen, Dench plays Victoria as all prickles and barbs, well satisfied with her absolute command over her insulated domains, happy to stalk Balmoral as a refuge from the prying press, and even from her glycerin prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, superbly played by Anthony Sher with a flawless symphony of phrase, expression, and tone to flatter, cajole, and persuade, all in service to the state and the monarchy that he, like Tories before and since, will to his dying breath defend.
So strong are the procreative impulses that when we see a man and woman who obviously love one another, we leap to the conclusion (as did the queen’s contemporaries) that sex must play a role. The gutter press dubbed Victoria 'Mrs. Brown' and even today rumors persist of a secret marriage, when all the evidence – historical and cinematic, as brilliantly portrayed by Dame Judi and by Glaswegian comedian Connolly, who absolutely deserved an Oscar for the role -- is simply that they were two post-sexual adults who understood and supported one another. We are spared soliloquies, sonnets, clinches, or trysts. Instead we have an aging grieving woman, and an aging fiercely protective man, whose mutual need and respect and trust and love is conveyed through what they say and what they do, and the choices they make, unto their graves.