Review Movies: Cinema | The Duchess | Keira Knightly | Saul Dibb | Ralph Fiennes | The Duke of Devonshire | Mills and Boon | love

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 4 September 2008

Keira Knightley stars in The Duchess

No love lost for Keira but Duchess is missed opportunity

THE DUCHESS
Directed by Saul Dibb
Certificate 12a

OH please, Keira Knightley, get your pouting face off my cinema screen until you have had a few more acting lessons.
In The Duchess she goes through her whole range of emotions: namely sultry stares at men she finds attractive, and grumpy pouts when things are not tickety-boo. Er, that’s it.
And for such a heavily hyped and well-produced film, Knightley’s lead and the screen time that goes with it, it’s disappointing that this wig and gown romp is essentially a tedious flip-book Mills and Boon love farce.
We meet young Georgina (Knightley), who has been selected by the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) as the wife who might bear him a male heir. She’s all for it at first. Marriage brings with it a few nice homes, balls awash with claret and men in tight breeches and spending money to fritter away at the card table means it’s all rather jolly.
But her husband simply treats her as if she were a cow to produce male calves and the sparkle in the life of the Duchess quickly disappears – especially when dashing young politician Robert Grey arrives on the scene to turn her head.
Sumptuous costumes and wonderful locations mean this film will no doubt be a Four Weddings-style hit across the Pond. But as a drama it’s a stinker.
As we stagger towards a tedious ending, Fiennes’s character is shown to be oppressed by the structures of society who demand he has a male heir, and who tell him it’s all right to be a total scumbag to the women in his life. But by the time the Duke is portrayed as an unwilling victim to circumstance, as well as his long-suffering wife, it is too late: you simply don’t care.
Perhaps the saddest thing about this film – apart from the blatant attempts somehow to suggest it’s a Georgian mirror of what happened to Prince Charles and Princess Diana – is that as the final credits role you realise the makers actually had a rather good tale on their hands and have bungled it.
Subtitles speak of the real life and times of Georgina, the Duke of Devonshire and the mistress who moved in with them.
It has all the ingredients – you can imagine the salivating that went on during the pitch – but it just makes it all the more frustrating that this has not come over in the two hours they had to tell this tale.

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