The Duchess

The career of Keira Knightley has been somewhat of a mixed bag. She has had strong moments, invariably under the direction of Joe Wright, and she has had her less brilliant moments, mainly in the later "Pirates of the Caribbean" films. But, in "The Duchess", an entertaining and moving portrait of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, she truly shows signs that she is coming of age with a performance of subtlety and nuance.

The film has been marketed with not so subtle emphases on Georgiana's relative, Diana, Princess of Wales. The tagline for the film, "There were three people in her marriage", is not only, by my count, a miscalculation (a serious miscalculation if you count the dogs) but also guilty of creating a subtext which simply isn't in the film. Anybody looking for a film about Diana will be disappointed. Anyone looking for an entertaining film won't be.

The film is a moving portrait of a very tragic figure, brought to life by a career best performance from Keira Knightely. Her abilities have grown over recent years, with "Atonement" being her previous best, but here she shows great potential. She is ably supported by Ralph Fiennes, who is on fine form. His performance never descends into caricature or cartoonish villainy, but maintains a sense of humanity, no matter how selfish it is, underneath his characters various inexcusable actions. There is also a fine performance from Charlotte Rampling, though there is a weak link in the person of Dominic Cooper, who is too young for his part and struggles with it.

The witty and emotive script has a lot to recommend it and its characters are put into an engrossing and lavish world, successfully created by the director Saul Dibb. Extraordinary costumes fill the extraordinary locations, and there is a beautiful score by Rachael Portman to accompany it. The result is a fairly stylish affair.

The film's exploration of unfortunate innocence and the loss of freedom is at times poignant and adds to what is an extremely satisfying experience at the cinema and provides a great deal of promise for the future from its director and its star.

The Duchess - Set at the end of the eighteenth century, The Duchess is based on the life of Georgiana Cavendish (Kiera Knightley), Duchess of Devonshire. The film delves into Georgiana's passionate and doomed affair with Earl Grey, the future Prime Minister, and the complex love triangle with her husband (Ralph Fiennes) and Georgiana's best friend, Lady Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell).

Kiera Knightley again does a period piece and again looks mostly out of place. She's British alright, but a few stone away from looking like she belongs in 1770's Britain. It's augmented by the fact that her character, based on a real woman, was supposed to have gone through about 6 pregnancies, 4 of them successful. Knightley's emaciated form is just wrong. What is right though, is her performance. As a mother, as a chasismatic political presence and a woman desperate for a happy life she nails it absolutely.

I could have seen a little less focus on the love triangle and a little more on the "hows" and "whys" of this woman becoming such an important and popular cultural icon in British society. The film glosses over how this came to be, and asks us to take it as a fact after one brief scene showing the Duchess's political shrewdness. It's another case of Hollywood ignoring what's different about a film, preferring the safety of delivering what people have seen before.

Fiennes gives such a quiet performance right from the start but it grows and fills the area. It's often a mesmerizing performance because of his rigid adherence to societies expectations and rules at the cost of all else. Fiennes occupies the screen whenever he's in a scene. When he and the Duchess argue, she's like water smashing up against the unyielding cliff. Ralph Fiennes is aw-inspiringly scary in one scene without seeming in anyway over the top or demonizing of what his character represents. Ultimately his character is human and believable; purely a man of his times. His character is so down to earth and in the end simple. All he wanted from his marriage was a son and to be left alone to play with his dogs.

A mesmerizing turn from Fiennes in a likable, if familiar film, The Duchess gets a B+

What rather wonderful about this story is that Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley) discovers a way to exult in victory over things and to get back some kind of power in a time where, really, women had very little… Being someone of great vitality and liveliness, she was very much a dreamer and an idealist, a woman who loved being the center of attention, who loved the fact at some point that her picture was in the paper, that the clothes were always talked of, that her every move was commented on…

We are immediately impressed by her presence, by her personality… She wasn't behaving quite in accordance with the way in which other 18th century women were expected to behave…

But there was something incredibly sad about this self-conscious lady… She was a victim of herself… A victim of her own innocence… A victim of people using her for their own profit… Even though she seemed to have everything, we realize that it was not that simple… And with all of her privilege came a lot of moral obligation and things were never what they really appeared to be…

The Duke (Ralph Fiennes) was a misanthropic man, rather cold, unemotional and quite cruel… He seems to like better his hunting dogs to his young wife… Of course with certain values, that he believes were absolutely right and that he strictly held to…

This sumptuous period piece also presents the Duchess of Devonshire as a political hostess… Saul Dibb's film shows us her dinner parties, her evening events, her fame and its extraordinary effect on her… It made her both desperate to please, terrified of doing anything wrong and shocked at her own celebrity and unable to figure out in her own mind why she was quite so famous… And we see the crippling effect it has on her sense of self

The latest slice of period drama to grace our screens is this biopic on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who during the 1770s was patroness of the Whig party and prisoner of a marriage which made her, among other things, suffer the indignity of having her husband's mistress living under the same roof. These heritage dramas are an industry all by themselves; the armies of prop hirers, wig and costume makers, researchers, production designers, location scouts and (mostly) British actors who go to make them must find themselves in almost permanent employ. The BBC does them, the Americans have a go at them, and the public can't seem to get enough of them. The Duchess is a superior example of the genre, though nowhere in the league of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, and combines the spectacle of Keira Knightley looking glamorous in a range of frocks and wigs, while at the same time honing her acting talents (no more those rictus grins), with the guilty pleasure of following the uncomfortable parallels between the fortunes and indiscretions of the ancestress of Lady Diana Spencer with those of the Princess of Wales herself. Lowering over the whole proceedings is the truly superb presence of Ralph Fiennes's Duke of Devonshire, Fiennes an actor who can convey polite discomfiture or threatening ire with slightest twitch of the mouth. In his hands the Duke becomes far less a melodramatic villain than a product of his time, and you almost feel sorry for him. Go and see The Duchess; only those who have had children will balk at the liberties taken with childbirth and breastfeeding. But not even that will spoil the fun.

I saw this film for the first time this weekend, and overall I liked it a lot. The story is a little uneventful, with some parts feeling as though they were skimmed over(the political life) or only briefly explored, and the pacing can be pedestrian. That said, it is a visual feast really, as the costumes, sets, scenery, cinematography, interiors and even the carriages are spectacular, while the music gives a lovely touch to the proceedings too. The script is well written and gripping, and the direction is fairly good. Kiera Knightley is great as Georgina, really quite dignified, while Ralph Fiennes is perfect as her philandering husband. To conclude, a visually beautiful film. 7/10 Bethany Cox