Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Kingdom

King Charles’ coronation last Saturday brought out the Anglophile part of me that’s fascinated by the British monarchy, its triumphs and its troubles. Queen Victoria had never been a particular favorite of mine—she has always seemed stuffy and dull—but a recent visit to Kensington Palace that featured an exhibit on her difficult girlhood showed me she was more interesting, and much stronger, than I had expected. So, as my own idiosyncratic way of celebrating the formal installation of the new king, I watched a 1997 British drama called Mrs. Brown (also known as Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown) that details a surprising relationship in Victoria’s later life It is not to be confused with Victoria & Abdul (2017),  about the elderly queen’s relationship with a male Indian Muslim servant. Obviously if you’re a woman who from 1837 to 1901 has ruled over the most powerful empire on earth, you have time for a good many surprising relationships.

 In both Mrs. Brown and Victoria & Abdul, the role of the queen is taken by the formidable Judi Dench, who has made something of a specialty of playing regal types. She won her Oscar in 1998 for playing Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, in a role that was scarcely eight minutes long. Remarkably, she was convincing as the imperious Virgin Queen despite looking in no way similar to the tall, slim Elizabeth. But I suspect that physically Victoria much better suits her petite, slightly plump frame. Her performance in Mrs. Brown too was much admired, leading to her first Oscar nomination: there have been eight in all.

 Playing opposite her is Billy Connolly, a Scottish actor once known for his raw stand-up comedy chops. His rough-and-tumble role is that of John Brown, a Scotsman who had once tended the horses for Victoria’s beloved late husband, Albert. Following the early death of Albert at age 42, Victoria has retreated to Scotland to mourn, presiding over a retinue of servants and hangers-on while turning her back on any royal duties. It is as part of a pact to lure her back to public life that Connolly is brought into her sphere. He makes quite a sight among the black-clad courtiers, wearing a kilt and his hair in a pigtail. Her royal highness first tolerates him because of Albert’s fondness for him, but then quickly succumbs to his blustering, bantering ways. Soon they are riding out in the highlands, and leading the dancing in Balmoral’s ancient halls. There’s no suggestion in the film that theirs is a romantic (o, heaven forfend, a sexual) relationship, but rather a deeply affectionate friendship that bypasses the difference in their public status.

 It's clear to see that Victoria enjoys this respite from her public obligations and this distraction from her private grief. Brown’s motives can more easily be questioned. As someone who came to the British throne before she was 20, Victoria obviously revels in the chance to be girlish. As for Brown, the film shows that his role at her side feeds an already healthy ego: he certainly takes the opportunity to lord it over the others who dwell in the servants’ hall. Still, there seems a selflessness in his loyalty to his sovereign. He makes a mistake or two, but surely seems to have her best interests at heart. Eventually, of course,  his role in her life comes under public scrutiny. When it gives rise to satirical cartoons and jests about “Mrs. Brown,” thus threatening her reputation in Parliament and encouraging republican moves against the monarchy, he knows where his duty lies.

 

Two Women: “Wanda” and “Iris”

 

By happenstance I recently saw two old films named after their leading female characters.  It’s always refreshing for me to watch a movie with a female focus. But Wanda and Iris couldn’t be more different.

 Wanda, from 1970, has nothing to do with a fish. (I loved the zany British black comedy, A Fish Called Wanda, which came out in 1988, featuring members of the Monty Python crew and a pre-Oscar Jamie Lee Curtis)  It is instead an ambitious indie, written and directed by Barbara Loden, an actress who had famously played the Marilyn Monroe role in Arthur Miller’s semi-autobiographical After the Fall at Lincoln Center. The play had been directed by the great Elia Kazan, who mentored Loden and subsequently  married her in 1966.

 Despite her years as an actress and a glamorous New York model, Loden understood from her own upbringing how a woman can be vulnerable to self-doubt and male manipulation. That’s why she chose to feature in her film-directing debut a blue-collar young woman from small-town Pennsylvania whose fundamental passivity makes her easy prey for conniving men. Immediately following her divorce (she arrives in court late, with her hair full of rollers) and the loss of all her cash, Wanda ends up in bed with a violent small-time crook who initiates her into a life of crime. This is hardly Bonnie and Clyde, in which a n attractive young woman discovers self-expression by learning to knock off banks. Wanda (convincingly played by Loden herself) is terrified, but lives for her man’s faint praise when she follows his lead.

 Despite its title character’s dependence on male approval, Wanda is considered a pre-feminist landmark, parly because it’s the rare film of its era made by a woman. It’s a straight-forward character study that knows how to put its limited resources on the screen. Upon release, it won an award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival. Years later, it was lovingly restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and in 2017 was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Though Loden next planned a cinematic version of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, she succumbed to cancer at age 46. 

 In contrast to Wanda, with its unsung heroine, Iris (2001) is about a very famous woman indeed: the much-honored British novelist Iris Murdoch. I’m often annoyed by films that hop around in time, but this one justifies its complicated structure by playing the college-age Iris (Kate Winslet) off against her elder self (Judi Dench). The youthful Iris is vibrant, reckless, and intensely sexual; her older counterpart is a revered public figure, until she starts succumbing to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus we cut from young Iris blissfully ocean-swimming in the nude to the old one recoiling in terror from the sea. Both actresses have been lauded for their performances, but equally impressive are Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent, who play Iris’s ever-loyal swain-turned-husband, a scholar named John Bayley. Broadbent was to win a well-deserved Oscar in his supporting role. The film is based on the memoir Bayley published after Iris’s death, and one of its central strands is the ordeal of watching someone you love disintegrate before your eyes into a person you don’t know.   

 The British film industry is so good at exploring complicated lives. Having seen this intelligent, beautifully conceived film, I’m eager to spend more time with Murdoch’s fiction. But the exploration of her lapse into dementia also remind me, oh so painfully, of my grandmother’s similar decline. Is Alzheimer’s the cruelest disease of them all? 

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