Period drama Belle is less 12 Years A Slave, more Downton Abbey

LESS 12 Years A Slave, more Downton Abbey — this period drama is stuffed to the brim with heated words and frosty glances in lavish drawing rooms.

THOUGH its core themes touch on entrenched racism and the undeniable immorality of slavery, it would be unwise to compare Belle to the recent Oscar-winner 12 Years A Slave.

This middling period drama — stuffed to the brim with heated words and frosty glances in lavishly appointed drawing rooms — plays more like Downton Abbey booted back a few centuries.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Dido Elizabeth Belle and Sarah Gadon is Lady Elizabeth Murray in Belle.

Viewers won’t be shaken by this true story so much as mildly stirred as they follow the title character’s unusual path through British society in the 1700s.

Orphaned as “a young person of colour” — the era’s polite label for those not lucky enough to be born white — Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has been raised in the privileged household of the most powerful judge in England.

Set to inherit her late father’s fortune when she comes of age, Belle is afforded all of the exalted comforts due a woman of her position, but none of the common respect.

Actors James Norton and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, centre, in Belle.

When her esteemed guardian (Tom Wilkinson) is forced to rule on a landmark case with major implications for the future legality of human slavery, Belle has an opportunity to exert an influence that may change the course of history for the better.

The film’s unwavering sense of the greater good — and the growing determination with which Mbatha-Raw’s performance embodies it — earns Belle the benefit of the doubt.

But only just.

BELLE (PG)

Director: Amma Asante (A Way Of Life)

Starring: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Matthew Goode

Verdict. Two-and-a-half stars. She’s proud, they’re prejudiced