[Film Review] Mrs. Brown (1997)

Title: Mrs. Brown
Year: 1997
Language: English
Country: UK, Ireland, USA
Genre: Biography, Drama, History
Director: John Madden
Writer: Jeremy Brock
Music: Stephen Warbeck
Cinematography: Richard Greatrex
Cast:
Judi Dench
Billy Connolly
Anthony Sher
Geoffrey Palmer
Gerard Butler
Richard Pasco
David Westhead
Sara Stewart
Rating: 6.4/10

I don’t want to be slanted towards any film labelled awards-crowned, which would be a surefire guarantee that it is better than average, even though it stars one of my all-time favorite actresses Dame Judi Dench and it is one of her premier glare. HMMB is a British period film from John Madden (whose SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE 1998 would upset the Oscar ceremony in 1999 and honor Ms. Dench’s a golden naked man for best supporting actress), wrestling with a solemn relationship/friendship between Queen Victoria and her staunch servant John Brown, a royal entanglement which almost hamper the monarchy in UK history.

It is perplexing to tell the narrative’s dependability because Brown’s diary has never been found, thus the film uses a mediocre approach to meticulously organize its contentious subject matter in a tenable and restrained patterns, the interaction between Queen Victoria and Mr. Brown is not as ample as one had anticipated, a bonafide friendship never really sensed throughout the entire round, also the screen time of Dame Dench is curbed into sundry fragmentary montages, the sparkle of a two-hander abates slowly and the final showdown has been sketched into a intensive but abrupt manifestation.

Ms. Dench rocks in her queenly selfhood, an inscrutably stately potency exuding from every scene she is in and Billy Connolly is not shied away from his zany and inflammable character, a tad hard to swallow but at least spiritually admirable.

All in all, the film has extracted a disreputable scandal from the British history and transformed it to an over-cautious biography which shows that it is as bland as the director’s emblematic signature of his works.