Downton Abbey (2010-15) [TV-PG] *****

An edited film review by David Wiegand for the S.F. Chronicle.

With a cast headed by Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern and a delicious Dame Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey is the story of the Crawley family, British nobles whose dynastic hold on their fortune and the stately mansion of the title is encumbered by something called an entail. That is a restriction established in a will that the entire estate of the present Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley (Bonneville), can only be passed on to his male heir as a package, including all the money his American-born wife, Cora (McGovern), pumped into the family.

All of that would be well and good, had the Crawleys begat a son. Instead, Cora gave birth to three girls: Mary (Michelle Dockery), Edith (Laura Carmichael) and Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay). As the series opens, it's April 1912 and word reaches the Abbey that the Titanic has sunk, taking with it a cousin and his marriageable son, who was destined to wed Mary to keep all the money in the family.

Although Robert's mother, the Dowager Countess Violet (Smith), has never been too keen on his American wife, she's willing to team up with her to fight the entail by nudging Mary, the eldest Crawley daughter, toward marriage with a distant cousin named Matthew (Dan Stevens), who has the temerity to work for a living (as an attorney) and is proud to be a member of the middle class. At one point, in conversation with the family, he mentions having spare time on weekends only, to which Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess asks: What is a weekend?

Yes, writer Julian Fellowes borrows a bit of this and a bit of that to craft his plot. There's also a touch of Brideshead Revisited, as well as Robert Altman's Gosford Park, which Fellowes wrote based on an idea by the director and actor Bob Balaban. And there's a whole lot of Upstairs, Downstairs: At least half the story focuses on the help, including the lovable housekeeper, Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), the stalwart butler and majordomo, Carson (Jim Carter), and Grantham's old military buddy, John Bates (Brendan Coyle), who is hired as his friend's valet. While the Crawley family squabbles and frets over the great matter - how to keep the estate intact - downstairs is full of intrigue as the footman Thomas (Rob James-Collier) conspires with a lady's maid, O'Brien (Siobhan Finneran), to get Bates fired.

Actually, there's quite a bit of ambition among the servants of Downton Abbey. Young Gwen (Rose Leslie), a farmer's daughter in service as a maid, is secretly learning to use a typewriter in hopes of becoming a secretary. Lady's maid Anna (Joanne Froggatt) has set her cap for the mysteriously reserved Bates. And the poor kitchen helper, Daisy (Sophie McShera), is desperate to catch the attention of the coldhearted Thomas, never quite getting the fact that, as the cook tries to explain it, Thomas is not a ladies' man. Not by half: He's already tried to blackmail a former boyfriend, an impoverished duke who descends on the household in hopes of securing Lady Mary's hand in marriage, but quickly exits once he realizes he won't get a penny of the family money.

It's inevitable that when you craft a plot that includes not only the kitchen sink but a host of additional household fixtures, things get a bit hard to believe here and there. Downton Abbey dips into out-and-out melodrama at various points, but you barely have time to roll your eyes before it moves on to yet another subplot.

Fellowes does a masterful job keeping all these plates spinning at the same time. But there are a few moments when he sacrifices character consistency for a good line. McGovern's Cora, for example, seems at one moment to be willing to marry her daughters off to livestock if it will keep the estate together, and at the next, is urging Mary to follow her heart. When Mary is caught in a premarital scandal with a swarthy foreigner, Cora is aghast for about a half second before turning her focus on how to contain the scandal long enough to get Mary lucratively wed.

Fellowes does know how to write some tasty dialogue, especially for Maggie Smith. On the other hand, Smith could turn the most mundane assemblage of words into aural poetry. Her Dowager Countess steals every scene she's in with a combination of tightly pursed sneers, half-lidded glares, undulating eyebrows and rippling vocalism.

The other performances are equally winning, but beyond that, you can't help feeling these actors are having a jolly good time with all this overblown fluff. And so will you. Downton Abbey runs six seasons comprising 52 episodes.

Labels: drama, period, romance, rom-drama-faves, tragedy
IMDb 87/100
MetaScore (critics=80, viewers=82)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=86, viewers=93)
Blu-ray
Netflix
Highclerc Castle (Downton Abbey)

Bridgerton (Season 1 - 2021) [TV-MA] ****

 A film review by Roxana Hadadi for rogerebert.com on Dec. 24, 2020.

Bridgerton is a scintillating, but somewhat shallow, Regency fantasy

As a genre, romance is frequently described with the kind of dismissive words that suggest a certain inherent, and often sexist, bias. Bodice-ripper isn’t so bad, but trashy is, and the latter comes up quite often in critical analysis of projects that dare to imagine their protagonists happy, in love, and having a lot of sex. This point isn’t to suggest that all romance films are actually good - rest assured that the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy will not be defended here - but to note that, like the romantic comedy, the romance genre tends to be targeted toward female fans, and also tends to be broadly derided. Is there some kind of connection there? Absolutely. And that’s what makes assessing a project like Netflix’s Bridgerton, with its varying pleasures and failures, so tricky.

On the one hand, the show’s juicier elements - the acrobatic sex, the whispered gossip, the fights and backstabbing - populate some of the series’ most exciting scenes. The ensemble cast tears into the witty one-liners and cutting insults of creator Chris Van Dusen’s adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels. The production and costume designers amp up the world of privilege these characters occupy with sprawling estates and opulent gardens, extravagant outfits of satin, tulle, and velvet, and elaborate ball after elaborate ball, during which anachronistic choices like Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next and Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy are performed by the Vitamin String Quartet. From both an aesthetic and erotic perspective, Bridgerton delivers. But where the show falters is in carving paths forward for its characters that feel in any way unique or singular. Instead, some of the storylines stretch out far longer than their natural evolution, while others are hastily introduced and resolved in a fraction of the time. The result is an inconsistently paced effort that ultimately reveals itself as an entirely predictable Pride and Prejudice retread. Bridgerton is amusing enough and will scratch a certain thirsty itch, but its themes about love, marriage, and class aren’t quite as progressive as it would like to think.

Van Dusen’s series transports us to a version of Regency-era England in 1813 that is far more ethnically diverse than history actually allowed. In Bridgerton, the Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) with whom the king fell in love is a Black woman, and his adoration of her paved the way for the inclusion of other races other than only white people in proper British society. But few families of any ethnic background can rival the powerful, prestigious Bridgertons, whose eldest daughter Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) is set to make her society debut. She is everything a desirable young woman should be - delicate, pretty, and slim; clever in conversation and demure otherwise; kind to household staff, commoners, and other elites alike; determined to be a good wife and mother - and the Bridgertons have high hopes that she’ll do well during the upcoming season of balls, parties, dinners, teas, and other events that allow for young men and women to catch each other’s eyes, and their parents to work out the details of their engagements. Although the Queen describing Daphne as flawless in her debut is a triumphant moment, younger Bridgerton sister Eloise (Claudia Jessie) correctly observes that the other 200 or so young women who also came out to society that year now have a collective adversary. What men will be left for them if they’re all off courting Daphne?

But things don’t go quite according to plan. The first issue is the arrival of the beautiful and mysterious Marina Thompson (Ruby Barker), a distant cousin of the tasteless, tactless Featherington family, who are frenemies of the Bridgertons. At the first ball of the season, Marina charms and enchants, while Daphne stumbles - literally. Her bumping into the eligible bachelor Simon, Duke of Hastings (Rege-Jean Page), and their terse conversation afterward, causes a stir. Mothers eager to get a member of the landed gentry interested in their daughters are constantly watching, and any misstep of Daphne’s could damage her marriage prospects. When Daphne realizes that her overprotective older brother Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), now the viscount of the house after her father’s death, is going to scare away any suitors whom he doesn’t consider promising, and when she learns that Simon is utterly disinterested in marriage and wants to get everyone off his back, the two of them hatch a plan. If Simon and Daphne pretend to be courting, Daphne’s unavailability will renew male interest in her, while Simon’s suggested affection for Daphne will dissuade female interest in him. They can’t stand each other (she calls him a rake; he calls her desperate), but each of them gets what they want - as long as the secretive Lady Whistledown, who serves as the series’ narrator (voiced by Julie Andrews), doesn’t find out about the scheme and spill the dirt in her rabidly consumed scandal sheet.

Of course, if you’ve read any Jane Austen novel, or seen any romantic comedy from the last 30 or so years (from Pretty Woman through Easy A), you can guess where this is going. Frustratingly, however, Bridgerton takes its sweet time getting there. About half the season is devoted to characters dancing around each other rather than proclaiming what they want, and after relationships are finally established, major obstacles are then inserted into the lovers’ paths, only to be hastily resolved. The inconsistent pacing makes for early episodes that drag and latter installments that seem too rushed, in particular a subplot about whether the purpose of marriage is love for its own sake, or children and familial legacy.

Those are major questions that Bridgerton tidily wraps up in about one episode’s time, sometimes with characters’ decision making taking place entirely off-screen, and the result is that certain arcs end up shortchanged. What causes a young woman to break up with one of the Bridgerton brothers after their prolonged, passionate affair? What inspires the individual who is eventually revealed as Lady Whistledown? What effect does the death of a patriarch have on a certain family? Bridgerton wants a little morsel of story for nearly everyone (except for the household staff members, maids, housekeepers, cooks, and servants, who are universally devoted, loyal, and perfectly happy serving all these rich people), which is admirable. But some characters get such scraps that it almost seems like a disservice to have made the attempt at all. And some of the series’ greatest shortcomings are how inconsistently it addresses the model minority pressure placed upon the characters who were elevated upward as a result of Charlotte marrying into the royal family, and how little attention it pays to Charlotte herself as a Black woman attempting to rule a country alone, rather than just serving as the ailing king’s wife.

Still, the cast is game for pretty much anything, and their willingness to throw themselves into numerous outsized declarations of love and a staggering array of energetic sex scenes (which last longer than you would expect, and are appreciably egalitarian in their focus on both male and female pleasure) sells a lot of this. Dynevor and Page have solid chemistry, and they convey the transforming feelings of the central couple. Their pivot into increasingly sexual flirtation, including a conversation about masturbation, is abrupt, but pays off with a callback later on. Also wonderful are Nicola Coughlan as the brainy Featherington daughter Penelope, whose close friendship with Eloise has been forged over years of rolling their eyes at their families’ antics, and Adjoa Andoh as Lady Danbury, a mother figure for Simon who can pull strings with the best of them. The flashbacks focusing on her tutelage of a young Simon allow the actress to display both steeliness and tenderness; Andoh’s performance is the most multifaceted performance of the whole show. Austenites will rejoice at scenes where one character gently pulls off another’s gloves or undoes the many tiny buttons of her undergarments, and when a declaration of love is given during a thunderstorm. And some of the series’ funniest moments arise from a self-aware cheekiness at the absurdity of this world: Anthony’s steward diverting his horse’s gaze from Anthony having sex with a woman up against a tree; one of the Featherington daughters fainting before Queen Charlotte because of a too-tight corset; Portia Featherington (Polly Walker) snapping at her daughter Penelope to put down a book lest it confuse your thoughts, and her husband, Lord Featherington (Ben Miller) for gambling away their wealth. More of that irreverence would have served Bridgerton well, instead of three separate episodes during which Daphne and Eloise struggle to understand what sex is and how women become pregnant. That thematic bludgeoning isn’t the show’s strong suit.

The primary issue, though, is that Bridgerton is most interested in maintaining a specific heterosexual woman’s fantasy, and will shuffle past legitimate concerns raised by its very narrative to maintain that dream. There is a formula for joy in Bridgerton, and the show never really strays from those beats: buck tradition and find a love match instead of an arranged marriage; be relieved to find that the man in question is fabulously wealthy; have immediately perfect and flawlessly exceptional sex; step up as a protective matriarch while maintaining your attractiveness and sexual desirability; live happily ever after. That soothing familiarity makes for pleasant viewing, but boring viewing, too. I am going to be a princess! Daphne exclaims at one point, her pouty proclamation complete with a foot stomp. Bridgerton is best when it services the scintillating elements of this story rather than the self-satisfied part.

Blogger’s comments: I must admit that I enjoyed Season 1 of Bridgertonas a delicious satire. The lily-white Court of St. James, from Queen Elizabeth on down, must be as horrified as Harry and Meghan are amused.

Labels: drama, Netflix, period, romance, satire
IMDb 73/100
MetaScore (critics=73, viewers=54)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=87, viewers=72)
Netflix
Roxana Hadadi’s published review

Lady Whistledown's guide to Bridgerton

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love Story (1970) [PG] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert on January 1^st, 1970.

I read Love Story one morning in about fourteen minutes flat, out of simple curiosity. I wanted to discover why five and a half million people had actually bought it. I wasn't successful. I was so put off by Erich Segal's writing style, in fact, that I hardly wanted to see the movie at all. Segal's prose style is so revoltingly coy -- sort of a cross between a parody of Hemingway and the instructions on a soup can -- that his story is fatally infected.

The fact is, however, that the film of Love Story is infinitely better than the book. I think it has something to do with the quiet taste of Arthur Hiller, its director, who has put in all the things that Segal thought he was being clever to leave out. Things like color, character, personality, detail, and background. The interesting thing is that Hiller has saved the movie without substantially changing anything in the book. Both the screenplay and the novel were written at the same time, I understand, and if you've read the book, you've essentially read the screenplay. Nothing much is changed except the last meeting between Oliver and his father; Hiller felt the movie should end with the boy alone, and he was right. Otherwise, he's used Segal's situations and dialogue throughout.

But the Segal characters, on paper, were so devoid of any personality that they might actually have been transparent. Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal, who play the lovers on film, bring them to life in a way the novel didn't even attempt. They do it simply by being there, and having personalities.

The story by now is so well-known that there's no point in summarizing it for you. I would like to consider, however, the implications of Love Story as a three-, four-or five-handkerchief movie, a movie that wants viewers to cry at the end. Is this an unworthy purpose? Does the movie become unworthy, as Newsweek thought it did, simply because it has been mechanically contrived to tell us a beautiful, tragic tale? I don't think so. There's nothing contemptible about being moved to joy by a musical, to terror by a thriller, to excitement by a Western. Why shouldn't we get a little misty during a story about young lovers separated by death?

Hiller earns our emotional response because of the way he's directed the movie. The Segal book was so patently contrived to force those tears, and moved toward that object with such humorless determination, that it must have actually disgusted a lot of readers. The movie is mostly about life, however, and not death. And because Hiller makes the lovers into individuals, of course we're moved by the film's conclusion. Why not? [Ebert’s rating: 4 stars out of 4]

Labels: drama, romance, rom-drama-faves, tragedy
IMDb 69/100
MetaScore (critics=84, viewers=76)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=60, viewers=78)
Blu-ray
Kanopy
Roger Ebert’s review

 

Gifted (2017) [PG-13] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for reelviews.net on April 6, 2017.

Here’s a piece of advice: don’t watch a trailer for Gifted prior to seeing the film. This warning has nothing to do with spoilers; the trailer makes the movie seem like a cloying, paint-by-numbers story that no one in their right mind would pay money to see. It does a disservice to a production that is more insightful and intelligent than one would suppose based on the advertising and marketing material provided by 20th Century Fox. Director Marc Webb brings the same kind of deft craftsmanship for drama and low-key humor that he exhibited in 500 Days of Summer and the result is emotionally true and dramatically solid.

The story sounds more generic than it is. Frank Adler (Captain America’s Chris Evans) is the guardian of seven-year old Mary (McKenna Grace), his dead sister’s daughter. Mary is a prodigy in mathematics, following in her mother’s footsteps. Frank decides that Mary, whose pastimes are focused on algebra and calculus, needs to become better rounded socially, so he enrolls her in a public school. Her introduction to the American education system is rocky but a helpful teacher (Jenny Slate), impressed by her mathematical prowess, takes an interest in her. Unfortunately, this is also around the time that Frank’s mother, Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), decides that her granddaughter’s gifts should be nurtured, not marginalized. This sets up a custody hearing in which two competing philosophies about parenting are pitted against one another. The screenplay is smart enough to present a balanced view in the courtroom, illustrating the positives and negatives of both. Although Gifted must ultimately side with one over the other to provide a satisfying conclusion, Webb and his screenwriter, Tom Flynn, are careful not to demonize either.

There are two components to consider when discussing Gifted. The first is the subject matter, which is uncertain territory for a theatrical release and generally more appropriate for a less ambitious made-for-TV production. However, the decision to establish a personal narrative in the wider context of a cultural question makes Gifted more compelling than it might otherwise be. Put simply, we are asked to contemplate the responsibility of parents and society when it comes to the nurturing and upbringing of a gifted child. Are we to allow them to just be a kid or is it incumbent upon us to hone their areas of strength at the cost of other aspects of their lives and personalities? There’s no easy answer to this question and Gifted doesn’t pretend that there is – it simply puts a human face on the issue.

The second aspect of the movie is its emotional temperature. Movies like Gifted often drift into a quagmire of manipulation and over-the-top histrionics. For the most part, however, Webb avoids this path. Yes, there are times during the final twenty minutes when he gets sappy in a quest to provoke tears and provide closure, but the film is solid when it comes to favoring grounded drama over soapy melodrama. The decision not to make Mary an adorable moppet helps immeasurably. She is presented (wonder of wonders) as a relatively ordinary kid who just happens to be very smart.

Two sequences exemplify Gifted’s level of insight and emotional exactitude. In the first, Mary spends a few days in Boston with her grandmother. This could have easily been an opportunity to portray Evelyn as a scheming witch. Instead, it presents scenes of tentative bonding and affection and illustrates that, whatever her deficiencies and blind spots, the older woman genuinely cares about her daughter’s daughter. Then there’s a meeting between Frank and Evelyn in which the two are able to put aside (at least briefly) their differences and interact in an honest manner.

Although Gifted is closer to Captain Fantastic than Captain America, Chris Evans bring his charisma to the part of Frank and gives a sufficiently credible performance that we’re not distracted by his higher profile persona as the First Avenger. McKenna Grace, who has a boatload of TV roles on her resume but limited theatrical exposure, is excellent as Mary – not too adorable, not too snarky, not too shrill. She was age 10 when Gifted was filmed but is believable as three years younger. Lindsay Duncan has the most difficult role – being the putative antagonist whose motives are pure but whose methods are questionable. Effective support comes from Jenny Slate as Mary’s first grade teacher and Octavia Spencer as Mary and Frank’s neighbor.

Despite Evans’ participation, Gifted is a hard sell. The dramatic nature of the material limits its overseas box office potential and the unglamorous story complicates the domestic marketing. The trailer is awful but that’s often the case with serious movies that can’t be reduced to two minutes of clips. Gifted deserves a chance. It’s emotionally satisfying and, except for some contortions during the final act, intellectually rewarding. [Berardinelli’s rating: *** out of 4 stars]

Labels: drama
IMDb 76/100
MetaScore (critics=60, viewers=75)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=64, viewers=80)
Blu-ray
Berardinelli’s review

 

 

Sophie Jones (2020) [NR] ****

An edited film review by Roxana Hadadi for rogerebert.com on Mar. 8, 2021.

Is there ever a point at which grief gets easier? 16-year-old Sophie Jones (Jessica Barr) is going through it. Her mother has recently died. She feels tangible distance from her sister Lucy (Charlie Jackson) and their father Aaron (Dave Roberts). Every day feels like a struggle that just bleeds into another, and another, and another. Nothing feels right - and that unease, when coupled with Sophie’s adolescent sexual awakening, makes for a complicated mix that Sophie Jones tracks with rawness, poignancy, and slightly too much vagueness.

The film is a family affair, directed by Jessie Barr and written by Jessie and her cousin Jessica, who also stars in Sophie Jones as its titular teenager. The Barrs drew from their own personal experiences as adolescents who each lost a parent to cancer, and the result is that Sophie Jones feels deeply authentic in its understanding of grief. There are no grand blowouts here, no massively emoting moments. Instead, Sophie Jones rejects linear storytelling to operate more as a series of vignettes, spread out over two or so years, which follow Sophie as she struggles to mourn her mother, develop her own personality, and explore her sexual identity. We jump forward sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, but the focus is always two-pronged: the inner sadness Sophie carries that she rarely shares with anyone else, and the outer sexual confidence - tiptoeing into aggression - that she displays as she jumps from boy to boy.

On the one hand, this centers Jessica Barr’s organic, naturalistic performance, allowing the actress space to work out the myriad oppositional complexities related to mourning and desire. When we meet Sophie, she’s opening the bag of her mother’s ashes, sifting through them with her fingers, and putting some in her mouth (something she’ll do as a defensive mechanism throughout the film). Is it macabre that in the next scene, she’s swiping on some lip gloss and sucking on a lollipop while proposing a hookup with classmate Kevin (Skyler Verity)? Maybe, but this sort of vacillation is Sophie’s new normal. She hasn’t been doing drugs, drinking, or engaging in self-harm, she tells a therapist - but what she doesn’t share is that her sexual experimentation is gaining her a certain reputation.

No interaction is exactly the same. There’s Kevin, who clearly has feelings for Sophie that go further than just their hookups; she shuts him down. There’s Tony (Chase Offerle) a senior who tells a friend of an acquaintance Kate (Sam Kamerman) that he thinks Sophie is cute; suddenly she’s planning to lose her virginity to him. There’s Riley (Tristan Decker) Sophie’s closest male friend, who has been by her side since third grade and who has never made a move - but whom Sophie tries to forcibly kiss in her car. Sophie’s grief and her sexual choices are probably interlinked, as Sophie’s worried best friend Claire (Claire Manning) suggests, but Sophie doesn’t care about being looked down upon by her classmates. So what if other girls laugh at her? So what if a random acquaintance pulls her aside to tell her she’s embarrassing herself? Could any of that really be worse than losing her mother? Sophie Jones doesn’t shy away from the reactions Sophie receives, but it refuses to judge her, either.

That’s an admirable, arguably essential, quality for coming-of-age stories; think of how other recent films in this subgenre, like Lady Bird, Skate Kitchen, and Hala, also treat their female characters with the respect that previous generations of films about young women often lacked. Sophie Jones equates being inside its character’s headspace with being close to her physically: tight shots of her profile as she drives around, a floating camera in her bedroom as she somberly thinks about her mother, and well-edited hookup scenes that capture her gleeful abandon or painful regret. But on the other hand, Sophie Jones sometimes stumbles in this narrowness. The film’s alignment with Sophie is so thorough that there are no scenes without her, which makes some of these time jumps disorienting. If we’ve been with Sophie this whole time, how did weeks just pass? When did the relationship she suddenly has with one of these guys occur? What happened in the time between, say, New Year’s, and when Sophie is suddenly getting ready to leave for college? The narrative connections are sometimes so hazy that Sophie’s behavior reads more as erratic than it does spontaneous, and additional plot details in the Barrs’ script might have better contextualized some of her personality shifts.

Nevertheless, this approach favors Jessica Barr’s inhabiting of the character she helped write, and that is undoubtedly the greatest strength of Sophie Jones. Watching it, I was reminded of Margaret Atwood’s quote from the novel Alias Grace: When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion. Nearly every scene in Sophie Jones is either meditative or combative in some way, and Barr nails the flickering, shifting, visceral emotions of adolescence. The deadpan way she says of oral sex, I could just bite his dick off if I wanted to, and then her little laugh afterward; her utterly unimpressed delivery of, This is sex? This is it?; the way her face shifts from tense rapture to barely veiled perturbation when Kevin asks her, You’re on birth control, right?; how she lets her sentences trail off when she’s tired of a conversation. Even when the script relies too much on her affect, the actress remains impressively self-possessed, and the film’s framing of her is evocative. Sophie Jones is a promising effort from both Barr women. [Hadadi's rating: 3 stars out of 4]

Labels: drama, high-school, teenager
IMDb 54/100
MetaScore (critics=72, viewers=tbd)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=72, viewers=80)
Blu-ray
Roxana Hadadi review 

Victoria (2016-2019) [TV-PG] *****

 A review by Martin Liebman for blu-ray.com on Mar. 4, 2017.

Queen Victoria. Just the title and name seem to ooze history, and rightly so. She was one of the most prominent and iconic monarchs in English history, one whose very name defines a legacy of culture, architecture, clothing, and sentimentalities of a bygone era. But beyond her place in the common vernacular, who was she? Who was the woman behind the crown and behind the connections for which she is so well known today? Filmed entertainment has explored her life and reign before, notably in the relatively recent film The Young Victoria, but the succinctly titled Victoria, through the eight episodes of Season One, aims to, and does, provide a more expansive and more in-depth view of her life, her politics, and British history and culture in the mid-1800s.

The show opens with the young Alexandrina Victoria (Jenna Coleman) learning that the king has died. At the young age of 18, she is now queen. The show progresses through her monarchy, depicting her rise to power at the head of the most powerful realm in world while asserting her independence from her mother. Season one covers only a brief three-year timeframe of her monarchy, but it does so in manner that introduces and defines key events surrounding her monarchy: her relationship with her future spouse, the push to produce an heir, and England's role in the world.

Victoria blends politics, family drama, and romance, an effortless marriage of story arcs and character movements that aim to attract a wider range of audiences than other tales of European monarchs past, even those that strive to transform them into more agreeably contemporary productions, such as Marie Antoinette. Character complexities and how they fit into the story are carefully defined and well performed, each actor understanding the story's wider berth and their varied places in it. The show proves an immense success at not simply telling Victoria's story, but defining her era as it was though her interactions with key figures around her and their own separate wants, schemes, and maneuverings through relationships, politics, and business. The show is much more grounded than many of its contemporaries, too, shying away from sordid excesses and offering a more thoughtful, character-driven tale that proves rich in its own way without going out of its way to lure audiences with needless escapades that distract from the show's, and the period's, and the characters', points of interest.

The show's diverse character roster offers incredible insight into the world as it was in Victorian England. The conflicted Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell) has dueling roles as Victoria's private secretary and advisor and Prime Minster. Through him, viewers will occasionally become privy to British politics and the house's inner workings. Outsider Prince Albert (Tom Hughes) has both industrial interests and curiosities about the British political system, offering insights into the parliament, social advocacy, and then-modern industry. These characters keep the story focused on the critical narrative devices, keeping the show from devolving into a simple exploration of the era's frivolity that would lessen the story's dramatic impact. Further, and in a change of pace from the focus of many similar stories, Victoria looks at the power beneath the stairs as Baroness Lehzen (Daniela Holtz) wrests control of the household away from the people placed in power by Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent (Catherine Fleming). Meanwhile, Miss Skerrett's (Nell Hudson) character adds intrigue as a member of the royal household with secrets that would see her fired should they come to light.

Production design -- sets and wardrobes -- does a remarkable job of transporting the audience into 1837 England. Viewers both familiar with Victorian furniture design and architecture or simply enjoying the luxuries the show has to offer are given a visual feast in the furnishings and rooms in Kensington, Windsor and Buckingham palaces, and Westminster Abbey which serve as believable stand-ins for their famous counterparts, even as the show wasn't filmed on location, as were portions of Marie Antoinette. The clothing of the various characters accurately fit the times, revealing the splendid opulence of the British court contrasted with the more utilitarian attire worn by commoners both in the castle and on the streets. Further, the show is splendidly composed and scored, both amazingly complimentary to every scene's mood, the characters' dynamics, and the story's flow.

But Victoria's true strength is neither the clothing nor scenery but rather the cast. Jenna Coleman does a masterful job as the sometimes brash and sometimes uncertain queen, particularly considering her burgeoning relationships with Lord Melbourne and Prince Albert. Her fluctuations between self-assured monarch and clueless and spoiled yet innocent child whose only real friend is her canine companion, Dash, lend the series and the character credibility and help bring her to life as a young woman instead of the older version of Queen Victoria more often depicted in film. Tom Hughes likewise impresses at presenting Albert not as the most well-known character but as the young Prince living out-of-place as he attempts to court the queen. The couple makes the uneasy transition from strangers to lovers believable, and their love story satisfies. [Rating: ***** out of 5 stars]

Labels: biography, drama, history, romance, rom-drama-faves
IMDb 82/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=87, viewers=83)
Blu-ray Season 1
Blu-ray Season 2
Blu-ray Season 3