Butler's Cinema Scene

Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Armstrong

“VICEROY’S HOUSE” My rating: B 

106 minutes | No MPAA rating

Gurinder Chadha’s “Viceroy’s House” is more history lesson than viable drama. But it’s compelling history, told with insight, cinematic savvy and a sense of scale that would make David Lean proud.

The screenplay (by Chadha,  Paul Mayeda Berges and Moira Buffini) concentrates on the last days of British rule in India in 1948, and the efforts of the last Viceroy of that country, the famous Lord Louis Mountbatten, to juggle dozens of competing interests to ensure that the new Indian republic gets off to a good start.

As it turns out, this is a fool’s errand, thanks to the perfidy of Mr. Churchill’s government (represented here by actors like Michael Gambon and Simon Callow). which is pulling strings behind the scenes.

But Mountbatten, a supremely decent man as played by “Downton Abbey’s” Hugh Bonneville, is a hopeful, sincere and largely selfless warrior doing what he thinks will be best for millions of Indians.

The film follows two trajectories.  First there’s the arrival of Mountbatten and his Lady Edwina (Gillian Anderson) and his installation as Viceroy amid all the pomp and ceremony of a royal coronation. Unlike virtually all of the Viceroys who served in India over three centuries,  Mountbatten and his wife are concerned mostly with the common good.

While Lord Mountbatten spars and cajoles with the leaders of various factions — historic figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah — his wife turns to humanitarian concerns. Both work to eliminate the Brit racism that seeped through previous administrations. Both seriously try to understand the culture and ethos of the great continent which they are charged with giving away.

Danish Dayal, Huma Qureshi

On a more personal dramatic level we have the mostly fictional story of two lovers, Jeet (Manish Dayal) and Aalia (Huma Qureshi), who are among the hundreds of Indians working in the palatial Viceroy’s House.

Jeet is a Hindu, Aalia a Muslim, and their star-crossed romance becomes the film’s emotional nexus as religious warfare breaks out, leading to the partition of India into two new nations — Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan — and the dislocation and deaths of millions.

Chadha’s previous efforts — lightweight charmers like “Bend It Like Beckham” and the Jane Austen-Meets-Bollywood comedy “Bride & Prejudice” — did not suggest that she possessed the vision to tackle a sweeping historic epic.  Yet just about everything in “Viceroy’s House” works.

And in a final epilogue we discover Chadha’s passion for this material is rooted in her own family history.

| Robert W. Butler