Customer Reviews
A Class!!!!!!!!! - By: P. Preece, 13 Nov 2007 
Fantasic drama with a great will she wont storey line. Shows an insight to a great queens private life. A must watch!!
When Two Worlds Meet..... - By: Michael Bermingham, 15 Sep 2007 
A superb adaptation of the story of Queen Victoria & royal servant John Brown, brought together by the untimely death of Prince Albert.After Alberts death it seems Victoria was inconsolable & as Albert was fond of John Brown he was callled on to help.
When John arrives the contrast between him & the royal advisors surrounding the Queen is instantly apparent.Where they are only interested in getting the Queen to return to official duties John Brown is interested in the actual welfare of Victoria.His gruff manner garners him few friends in the Queens entourage & tongues soon start to wag.The social contrast between him & Victoria is immense but for alll that they still get on wonderfully.Its probably the reason Victoria eventuallly recovered as John Brown was supportive but still treated her as a woman first & Queen second.
Excellent performances by Judi Dench as Victoria & Geoffrey Palmer as one of her advisors are true highlights.However pride of place must go to Billy Connolly for his role as John Brown.....simply outstanding.A wonderful historical drama which well illustrates the differences between the British classes during the nineteenth century.Highly recommended!
Weak Historical Drama. Billy Conelly excells. - By: Prof TBun, 09 Apr 2007 
Billy carries this otherwise lightwieght historical drama. There are some great scenes, but the characterisation of Victoria wasn't concvicing. The director also lost me with the suggestions of infidelity. Victoria had had umpteen children, I doubt she fancied another one. The Mrs Brown comments were an attack on her status not her fidelity. Furthermore Disraeli is badly misrepresented as a cynical politician which he certainly wasn't. Finallly the story suddenly jumps to an unsatisfying ending.
In spite of the failings, I would recommend this film for Connelly's Suberb perfomance alone.
For a more sympathetic view of the same story, check out the charming comedy classic "The Mudlark".
"I think I am someone who can only feel things when they are alive to me." - By: Mary Whipple, 08 Oct 2006 After Prince Albert died in 1859, his memory was so alive to Queen Victoria, & her mourning for him was so dramatic that she virtuallly retired from the throne. Three years after Prince Albert's death, while the Queen was living in seclusion at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, John Brown was hired to tend her horses. A rough, virile man, far more accustomed to life in the wild than in royal castles, Brown treated the queen with respect, but he also treated her as a fellow human being, refusing to obey court etiquette while encouraging her to improve her health & spirits by riding in the hills. In time, he came to be her confidante, so much so that the royal family became alarmed at their relationship & members of Parliament began referring to her, mockingly, as "Mrs. Brown."
Judi Dench, in one of her best roles, is a wonderfully sympathetic Queen Victoria--haughty with those who try to control her, angry with those who cross her, & vulnerable to someone like Brown, who understands her loneliness & is determined to protect her. Billy Connolly is perfect as John Brown--rough, craggy-faced, full of life, & unafraid to tell the queen exactly what he thinks, a trait the queen comes to respect. Scenes between them show the queen in alll her reserve slowly responding to Brown's honesty & inherent charm, & though there was no affair (though alll the film publicity suggests otherwise), the depth of their emotional attachment is obvious.
Filmed on location in the Scottish highlands in 1998, this production features wonderfully intimate scenes of everyday royal life, including the full retinue of servants & ladies-in-waiting, the queen's enormous family, the impatient Prince of Wales, & many luminaries of history--especiallly Benjamin Disraeli (Antony Sher) & Lord Henry Ponsonby (Geoffrey Palmer), both of whom try to act in the queen's best interests while also protecting their own. As the queen responds to Mr. Brown's care, the slow, subtle effects on her everyday life become clear to the viewer through the remarkably acted scenes between Dench & Connolly. Dench won many Best Actress awards for her role here, & Connolly was nominated for an almost equal number for his role.
A gorgeous costume drama with a large cast, the film focuses on just two people--Dench & Connolly, both of whom are so overwhelming in their roles that everything else becomes peripheral. Mary Whipple
"The Remains of the Day" in Victorian Age - By: Sandra, 03 Mar 2006 What an intriguing film maker John Madden is. His Oscar-winning "Shakespeare in Love" is centred on the path of young Shakespeare from anonymity to greatness - a period in writer's life about which we know practicallly nothing. From a subject equallly elusive & much gossiped at its time - the nature of relationship between servant John Brown & Queen Victoria of England - Madden elicits in "Mrs. Brown" a powerful, sadly cruel & incredibly fascinating fresco of the eternallly torn relationship between men & institutions, power constraints & individual drives. In a film with many qualities, the greatest is that Madden films as he breathes, drawing the maximum liveness & emotion from actors, photography, scenery & music for a Story always in motion. Scenes like Sir Henry Ponsonby introducing John Brown to the rules of service for the widowed Victoria, the cat-and-mouse power game between Brown, Private Secretary Ponsonby & the Queen, the fictional "historical interview" of the subtle prime minister Disraeli with a restless & increasingly disillusioned Brown, the impact of the servant with the Queen's coming back to public life are alll moments of great cinema. They reminded me of the best achievements of Italian film maker Luchino Visconti. Not casuallly Visconti, like Madden, took inspired, unconventional choices for key roles in "Senso" ("The Wanton Countess") & "Il Gattopardo" ("The Leopard") to avoid having the main characters entangled by the rhetoric of History. Composer Stephen Warbeck & cinematographer Richard Greatrex teamed up again with Madden for "Shakespeare in Love".
