We all know how much cinema adores a good historical story, with the very origins of Hollywood being rooted in historical epics and period pieces that aimed to transport us to a different time and place, giving us the chance to sample from the people who preceded us. It has become a genre so saturated, that it has spawned entirely different off-shoots in which even more films can be categorized. However, when they are made well, these films can be quite enthralling and often extremely entertaining, even if only as beautiful diversions. This final term is the perfect descriptor for Viceroy’s House, in which director Gurinder Chadha travels to one of the most crucial moments in India’s history – namely the period in which it gained independence – to explore the history of the country, both its search for liberation from the British Empire, and in the creation of the state of Pakistan, one of the most contentious and challenging moments in the country’s history, and one that is examined with striking detail throughout this film. Logically, we look at a film like this and view it as a relatively simple affair – a strong story (in this case based on two non-fiction texts, Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, and The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of Partition by Narendra Singh Sarila, both of which add context and historical detail to this semi-fictional retelling of the period), a solid cast and beautiful direction make for a couple of hours of entertainment, even when it isn’t as thought-provoking as it may have been with a more challenging and thoughtful approach to the direction. It is more complex than it appears on the surface, but it never seems to be entirely interested in going too deep into the historical context, instead existing right at the centrepoint between fact and fiction, which is somewhat understandable, even if it isn’t particularly daring or worthy of too much attention.

While she is not a household name on her own, Chadha has made films that the majority of us at least have encountered in some form or the other, since she has been working for decades as someone who produces effortlessly likeable, deeply entertaining films that usually toggle the line between comedy and drama in increasingly charming ways. Viceroy’s House is one of the rare instances of a straightforward drama, and it is also arguably the director’s most ambitious production yet, which is certainly admirable enough to keep us invested in the project. We can reduce this film to the very basic fact that it is a well-made period piece and not much else – there isn’t too much complexity that drives this story, and it is mainly an opportunity to transport the audience back to the 1940s, a period in which British and Indian culture was co-existing (albeit not necessarily in harmony, and the film does at least show the efforts of the native population to maintain their cultural identity, which was not nearly as easy as it would seem based on sanitized recounting of history), but where the two were undergoing the process of separating, which was certainly not a mutual decision but one that was nonetheless essential based on the imperial era coming to an end. These are the elements that are most interesting about this film, so it is disappointing when the attention is redirected away from these more harrowing conversations in favour of something slightly more simple and placid. Chadha makes a concerted effort to showcase Indian culture in vivid detail – the costumes are extraordinary, with the use of colour being unforgettable, enough to linger with the viewer much longer than anything we find embedded in the story itself, which may seem like this film is an example of style over substance, which is not entirely truthful. We can marvel at the splendour of the film since a lot of work went into the visual aspects. Unfortunately, the elements that we are most interested to see are far more rare to find when scattered throughout this film, making it seem less effective than we may have anticipated based on the material.

However, once we move past the visual components of Viceroy’s House, we have to question whether there is more to this film than just the beauty and splendour that we find accompanying the story. Unfortunately, this is where the novelty begins to wear off – this is undeniably a film with a strong connection to the past, but it also happens to try to condense far too many themes into a single narrative. The intentions were admirable, but there are several different plot threads that begin to fall apart when we find that the film can’t explore every one of them, instead glossing over too much vital information and hoping that the audience will be able to fill in the gaps, which does arguably give us a reason to explore these events more deeply on our own time (which is certainly not a bad idea, if it was intentional), but also means that there isn’t enough space to expand on the more intriguing details that would have been present had the film either been granted more length – perhaps as a limited series, which would have most certainly allowed for a more concise and detailed approach to the material – or simply known which themes to develop over others. It also doesn’t help that the ending is ambigious, and offers very little closure or resolution, concluding the otherwise gentle film on quite a dour note. There are post-script notes that state a more positive outcome, but any film that has to rely on this approach is not compelling enough to end the story with something actively interesting. It isn’t even so much that the tone at the ending is sadder than usual (since we would be foolish to have hoped for a happy ending), but rather that it is so abrupt and doesn’t tie up the loose ends that the film so gleefully introduced throughout the story, leading to a rather unlikable and frankly not very interesting film that doesn’t quite understand either its audience or the subject matter in the way that would have made for a more satisfying, thought-provoking conclusion, a sentiment that we can find is applicable to many moments in this film.

Much of the promotion around the production Viceroy’s House was based around the casting, with the decision to have Hugh Bonneville play the part of Lord Dickie Mountbatten being one clearly done to play off his years of solid work portraying these spirited protagonists in period pieces, something that he has seemingly mastered to the point that it sometimes feels like he is undersold as someone who is just as gifted in contemporary stories. He’s very good in this film but doesn’t deliver anything particularly outstanding or remarkable, except a few solid moments in which he shows some sense of complexity, but these moments are unfortunately few and far between. However, he is at least quite solid, whereas the rest of the cast feels quite unstable – his loyal wife Lady Edwina Mountbatten is played by the usually very good Gillian Anderson, who unfortunately falls victim to her own tendency to become quite mannered, almost to the point where this is bordering on a bad performance, one that is best described as a parody of the stiff-upper-lip aristrocracy that we usually find anchoring these stories. Anderson is someone who tends to become too invested in the more detailed aspects of her characters, and without the right director to harness that energy, it becomes quite exhausting, with this being one of her weaker performances, despite it being a potentially very strong character. The rest of the cast barely registers – Sir Michael Gambon does relatively well as the viceroy’s right-hand-man, whereas Simon Callow has a very brief performance as one of the key players in the liberation of the country, but leaves just as fast as he arrives. The Indian cast has a lot of promise, with Manish Dayal and Huma Qureshi doing their best with relatively one-dimensional characters that could have been further developed, but at the very least show some promise. Chadha did not have broad ambitions to make Viceroy’s House a more ambitious, character-based production, and this shows heavily in the performances, which are passable but nothing remarkable.

Viceroy’s House is the perfect embodiment of what we can call the middle-ground historical drama – it is not complex or challenging enough to be entirely factual or seen as something that should be taken as being steeped heavily in reality, nor is it light enough to be dismissed as merely diverting fiction based on real events. Instead, it takes an approach that situates it squarely in the middle, offering an interesting and often quite moving portrait of the past, but never in a way that feels like it is intending to stir much thought or be an entirely educational experience outside of a few key facts. It has moments of striking beauty, but we are too distracted by these visual elements to actually notice that the story that occurs alongside them is not nearly as strong as we may have initially anticipated. We come to realize that a film built on the beauty of the past can be worthwhile, granted there is something deeper to be said about the historical context – this film is certainly not entirely void of merit in terms of the story it tells, and often seems to be too ambitious in trying to cover as much ground as it possibly can, and in the process begins to fall apart, becoming quite unnerving in how it wants to examine far more than is actually possible given its constraints. It looks beautiful and is relatively well-written, and the actors do manage to add a level of humanity to the story – but ultimately, Viceroy’s House is just too dull to make much of an impact, and becomes more of an effort to stir thought than actually honour the legacy of the people at the heart of this story, which could have resulted in a far better and much more concise and meaningful historical drama.