Friday
10Oct2008
Movie Review - 'The Duchess'
Friday, October 10, 2008 at 12:02AM | The Duchess
Starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, and Hayley Atwell  |
When
Keira Knightley burst onto the scene five years
ago, not many people thought we were looking at The Next Big Thing, but in that
short time, the 23-year-old Knightley has become an incredibly bankable female
movie star (Forbes ranks her as the second-highest earning actress) and
she has done so while taking on some challenging roles. Unlike a lot of actors in her age group, Knightley has not strictly been a blockbuster girl, nor has she frittered away her talent making forgettable romantic comedies. Indeed, outside of the Pirates of Caribbean trilogy, nearly every role she has taken brings a certain amount of risk, and they're the films most young movie stars would avoid, because they aren't potential franchises.She picked up an Oscar nomination for Pride and Prejudice, astutely chose to work with director Joe Wright again last year in Atonement, and now we find her going toe-to-toe with Ralph Fiennes and Charlotte Rampling in The Duchess.
If nothing else, she deserves credit for not being another Kate Hudson.
Of her more serious work, Knightley is more the centerpiece in The Duchess than anywhere else. She brings to Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, an elegance you'd expect from both character and performer, and while she falls short of mesmerizing, Knightley is more than up to the task at hand, and is often jarringly good.
She is aided by everything around her, from the work of Fiennes as her philandering husband and Hayley Atwell as the woman in question to the sumptuous costumes and pitch-perfect production design by Michael O'Connor and Michael Carlin, respectively. Fiennes provides his finest performance in the past few years, which would shrink a lot of actors by comparison, but Knightley meets him head-on in every confrontation.
Historically, Georgiana became well-known throughout the United Kingdom for a great many things: Her fashion and style, her political and literary attachments, her gambling addiction, and her troubled and dysfunctional relationship with her husband. In her husband's feverish quest to sire a male heir, Georgiana had numerous miscarriages (she is depicted in the film as being pregnant some seven times in five years). This struggle may have led him to stray in their marriage, although he was likely to have done so either way.
Georgiana did not divorce, and the relationship became even stranger after she finally gave birth to a son.
But although The Duchess has a good story, looks the part, and features two memorable performances, it's all a little unsatisfying. It's not a bad film, certainly, but it's also not one of the year's best. There isn't one thing that has a negative impact on the movie, and there aren't dozens. It just feels obligatory in a way.
Strangely, it's really not that common a story, so expressing what feels empty about the experience is hard to do. There's nothing dreadful here and maybe there's just no epiphany, either; perhaps it's that we expect costume dramas to look and behave a certain way and this one does is exactly that.
Chalk it up to just not being the movie it should be, even with Knightley's unassailable performance.
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