To be released tomorrow on DVD: "The Young Victoria"

Grade: B

In one portrait of the young Queen Victoria, the 18-year-old who ascended the British throne in 1837 and gave the Victorians their name, she sits in her coronation robes staring straight ahead with a somewhat glazed expression. Her arms are white and fashionably plump, her dress cream and splashed with gold. Her coronation robe, a massive ermine-and-red-velvet cloak, spills off her bared shoulders and onto the ground, creating a luxurious puddle. She looks a bit bored — heavy hangs the crown, or at least those opulent threads.

This isn’t our familiar image of Victoria, the globular old lady shrouded in widow’s weeds and vehement melancholia, and wearing a dour look that suggests that she was never amused, not now, not ever. That woman, who became known as the Widow of Windsor after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, is nowhere to be seen in The Young Victoria, a frivolously entertaining film, with Emily Blunt, about the young monarch. Blunt, who as Meryl Streep’s viperous assistant in The Devil Wears Prada” slyly upstaged Anne Hathaway, doesn’t have Victoria’s padding or bearing, which is probably why she was cast in the role. No one wants to watch the lives and loves of the rich and dowdy.

That at least seems to be the prevailing filmmaker wisdom, which is why what we usually get in movies about royal personages from dusty and distant worlds are sumptuous frocks, soaring music, a dash of intrigue and thunderous nonsense. Young Victoria — the latest in a long line of fictional entertainments about the dramatic, if more often than not melodramatic, ups and downs of female British monarchs — fits the bill nicely. There’s something about a queen that inspires filmmakers (audiences too), who enjoy pulling the curtain away from these most private lives and taking peeks under the royal robes. Because this queen spent so much of her life draped in black and gloom, her younger self would seem particularly ripe material.

She is and she isn’t, at least here. Directed with some snap by Jean-Marc Vallée from a screenplay by Julian Fellowes, The Young Victoria opens with some turgid on-screen text about her birth in 1819: “A child is born.” No, not Jesus, but little Victoria, heir to the throne and the only daughter of the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) and the unseen, soon-to-be-dead Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. But while she was born with a royal spoon in her mouth, little Victoria, like so many rich girls before and since, proves deeply unhappy. “What little girl does not dream of growing up as a princess,” Victoria asks early in dolorous voice-over, before lowering the boom: “Even a palace can be a prison.”

A chill fills that palace’s rooms, a coldness largely emanating from the duchess and her close adviser, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), who keep Victoria under lock and key to control her and the power she will assume. Isolated from other children, with only servants and a spaniel for company, Victoria amuses herself as best she can. Blunt tries her hardest to interest us as well, but there is limited entertainment in watching even an appealing actress wander forlornly, talking to herself and the dog. Victoria, it seems, wasn’t all that interesting at this stage in her life (or so it appears here), which might explain why Vallée tweaks his material to the point of exaggeration, sometimes to the point of parody, as with Strong’s virtual mustache-twirling.

Happily, the story of young Victoria is also the tale of her relationship with her young consort, Albert (Rupert Friend, pretty and pink-cheeked), her first cousin. Born on the Continent, in part of what would become Germany, Albert enters Victoria’s life obliquely, first through the machinations of their uncle, King Leopold of Belgium (Thomas Kretschmann), and then during tentative visits. There’s a political dimension to Leopold’s matchmaking, but those details are immaterial to the romance that develops and deepens. Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to persuade us that The Young Victoria is a serious work, and despite some tense moments and gunfire, the movie’s pleasures are as light as its story. No matter. Albert may never rip Victoria’s bodice, but he does eventually loosen it, to her delight and ours.