The Duchess (2008)

Director: Saul Dibb                                  Writers: Jeffrey Hatcher & Anders Thomas Jensen
Film Score: Rachel Portman                    Cinematography: Gyula Pados
Starring: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Dominic Cooper and Charlotte Rampling

The Duchess is an incredibly beautiful film to watch. In terms of production design, costume and makeup, it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, and it’s fitting that costume designer Michael O’Connor was awarded the Oscar that year. The difficulty with the film is a lack of plot, but that is really due to the source material the true story of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire in the biography written by Amanda Foreman. But the key, I think, to fully understanding the film and judging it correctly is to see it in this context. It’s not a novel, full of plot and irony and intrigue; it’s the story of a woman’s life, a woman who tried her very best to do the right thing and ended up suffering for it.

The film begins with Georgiana, played by Keira Knightley, being married off to the Duke of Devonshire, Ralph Fiennes, who seems to have little genuine interest in her save that of delivering him a male heir. Though she appears to understand the bargain in the beginning, the ways of the gentry are disturbing to her, and as she tries to find her own way she is blocked at every step by her husband. Both Knightley and Fiennes are very good, each in their own way. Knightley is the master of emotion, displaying volumes for us to read in her face without saying a line. If the best acting is re-acting, then she’s one of the best. Fiennes’ role for the film is the opposite. “Emotionally constipated” he called it, unable to maintain even the remotest of personal relationships with his own wife. He is a cipher, continually retreating into his world of formality and privilege to avoid knowing her in any way but as the guarantor of his successor.

There’s nothing terribly exciting here, no surprise plot twists, no happy endings. It is life, however distant in the past, and unlike fiction most people are loath to voluntarily put themselves in a position of peril. Georgiana is no exception. For all of her desire to have made different choices in her life, it’s difficult to know what might have been better, and of course the lingering reality that it could have been much worse has to be factored in. It is the study not of a character, but of a person, one with absolutely no power or freedom save that which is deigned to her by her husband. Emotion, however is there in abundance. It’s easy to sit in our twenty-first century world and be maddened that she doesn’t make different choices. But that is part of the film’s message, and we are left to watch, helpless, as much a prisoner to the plot as the Duchess herself. If you allow yourself that small conceit, I'm confident you'll find The Duchess a moving and rewarding experience.