The colour of grief

Mrs Brown John Madden (PG)

The Madness of King George showed that royal history could yield rich veins of human narrative, backstage dramas in lives where nothing can remain backstage for long. Mrs Brown is an account of a lesser crisis, the period in Queen Victoria's life when obsessive mourning for Prince Albert kept her out of the public eye, and at risk of public disaffection. She was comforted by the friendship of a Highland servant, until this intimacy became a problem in its own right. It had always been accepted that Scots spoke their minds, and manners were much more democratic at Balmoral than at Windsor, but John Brown treated his monarch with an affectionate brusqueness that could sometimes amount to barracking.

Mrs Brown is written by Jeremy Brock and directed by John Madden, but the idea originated with executive producer Douglas Rae, who tried decades ago to cast Sean Connery in the role of Brown. The project came to nothing when it emerged that the Royal Family was unhappy with the idea. You couldn't ask for a clearer sign of changing times. Mrs Brown as made has no sort of official blessing, and the film-makers have been able to use only a couple of authentic locations - Taymouth Castle for a ball scene, Osborne House for exteriors. But it would now seem absurd to abandon a project out of an over-developed sense of tact, and equally absurd for the Royal Family and its advisers not to see the advantages of a warm portrait over dignified silence.

The film is agreeably low-key, but starts with a couple of melodramatic flourishes. We see a bust falling in slow-motion from battlements, and shattering on gravel. This turns out to be the bust of Brown supposedly destroyed by Victoria's son and heir Bertie when he heard about the death of a man he saw as an enemy. Then we see John Brown (Billy Connolly) rushing frantically through a wood with his pistol drawn, eventually firing at an invisible intruder on the Royal Estate. This is Brown in later life, still serving the Queen but denied her friendship, and cracking under the pressure of it all. At the end of the story, he is where Victoria was at its beginning - deprived of companionship in a world of duty.

Connolly makes a very fine job of the part, helped perhaps by Brock's script, which presents a generally favourable picture of Brown but hardly idealises him. From the beginning, he throws his weight around in the servants' hall. He asks what the Queen is currently reading (Tennyson) so that he can tune into her wavelength. When he finds favour, he consolidates his position by making sure that all communication with the Queen goes through him, an immemorial tactic of the courtier. It's just that he's one of the few courtiers in history to rise by reason of a rough tongue rather than a smooth one. When the Queen mentions that she is thinking of publishing her Highland Journals, he asks: "Are they worth reading?"

The Queen in 1864 was in a rut of grief from which Brown undertook to jolt her. Victoria in her bereavement trundles round Osborne House, her retinue in step behind her, until something outside the windows catches her eye. It's Brown, patiently waiting with a white horse (you can hardly reproach a white horse for not being in mourning). He is told not to attend on Her Majesty unless summoned, but he refuses. Day after day, he offers Victoria the same visual cue, and the possibility of seeing herself in a new way, of entering a Landseer painting. Once she is on the horse, of course, she's in a different relationship with her surroundings, and her retinue has dwindled to one. Now if he says something irreverent, or she discloses a raw emotion, there are no other witnesses.

Victoria in mourning, entirely given over to introspection but never alone, has managed to combine the miseries of solitude and of company. Her expeditions with Brown gradually restore her sociability, though this works best away from court. On one occasion, she pays a social call on the Balmoral Estate, and despite her hostess's fits of convulsive curtsies, even lays the table for dinner. With a discretion that shows he has some of the courtier's traditional skills after all, Brown mutely signals to her the correct position for a spoon.

The difference between their temperaments and circumstances is clear enough, and the director resists the temptation to wallow. Brown may skinny- dip with his brother Archie, not because he wants to, but also because there's no one to mind if he does, but the Queen enters the water hatted and shod, from a bathing carriage with a monogram, while the Princesses flounder grimly alongside her in their enveloping black costumes.

Judi Dench's face is a crossroads of imperiousness and vulnerability: it's shocking that she has never before played the lead role in a film, but here she has her revenge. On her first meeting with Brown (who had attended her and Prince Albert in happier times), she reacts with indignation and then rage to the impertinence of his saying, "Honest to God, I never thought to see you in such a state." But between the indignation and the rage, Dench manages to insert a moment of desperately wanting to confide - a finger-hold for Brown's frankness.

Her most emotional scene is one with the Dean of Windsor (Oliver Ford Davies), in which she tearfully, miserably confesses that she feels less grief now than before, that it is a failing of hers to perceive the living more vividly than the dead for all their merits. Choosing his words carefully, the Dean gives his Queen the absolution she wants. Surely settled resignation is to be preferred to active grief. What is wonderful about the scene is not just Dench's outpouring of feeling but her sudden retraction of it. The Dean has obligingly told her that it is all right to be comforted - exactly what she can't bear to admit has happened. For a moment she bridles, as if she was about to rebuke him for the impertinence of telling her what she needs to hear.

The film is rounded out by a ripe caricature of Disraeli by Antony Sher. This Disraeli has solved the problem of sincerity by never affecting it. There's one lovely moment when he receives a compliment, and it looks as if he's going to poo-poo it politely, but the seconds pass and he can't quite bear to. His manner is one of pained suavity and rolling eyebrow motion, whether he's finessing his weak position in the House of Commons or going on a shoot in the Highlands as part of his plan to stir the Queen into public life again. Offered a gun when the stag is sighted, he waves it away as if it was a cigar offered in a London club n

On general release from tomorrow