If you’re going to play the lead in an elaborate British costume drama — if you are, for instance, Keira Knightley and you’re starring in The Duchess — there are two main skills that you’re going to have to master. First, you’re going to have to look really good with your head weighed down beneath an increasingly elaborate series of hats and wigs. Knightley vaults over this hurdle easily: in the scene where her character, the glittering 18th-century aristocrat Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, lends her starpower to a public speech by aspiring politician Charles Gray, she shows up wearing a hat piled high with enough feathers and fur to increase her height by at least 33 per cent, her face framed by luxurious brown curls whose colour sets off her dark blue jacket and skirt and which matches the fur muff, the size of an ottoman, which conceals her hands. The moment Knightley steps onscreen, you can imagine costume designer Michael O’Connor eagerly counting down the days until the Oscar nominations are announced.
Second, you’re going to have to perfect the art of walking rapidly down a palace corridor while barely choking back tears. And again, Knightley has obviously trained well for the role: The Duchess requires her to do roughly three tearful corridor walks, and Knightley deserves high marks for each of them.
Why is Georgiana crying so much? Well, she has the misfortune of being a passionate woman in a sexist, hypocritical era. Her husband (Ralph Fiennes) loses interest in her very early in the marriage — his only interests appear to be his dogs and siring a male hair, while Georgiana has only two legs and persists in giving birth to girls — and transfers his affections to Georgiana’s friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell). Indeed, the Duke is so open about his extramarital relationship with Lady Elizabeth — she even sits with Georgiana and the Duke at the dinner table — that he’s less a man with a mistress than an unofficial bigamist.
But the Duke’s open attitude toward marriage does not extend to his wife; he ruthlessly shuts down Georgiana’s affair with Charles Gray (Dominic Cooper, the young groom from Mamma Mia!) by threatening to bar Georgiana from ever seeing her children again.
Georgiana’s marriage to the Duke was supposedly the inspiration for playwright Richard Sheridan’s comedy School for Scandal — Sheridan is even a minor character in The Duchess — but this film takes a less puckish approach to its subject matter. It’s a solid, straightforward historical drama, with an above-average cast and above-average production values, directed with more polish than flair by Saul Dibb. The jury still appears to be out on Keira Knightley’s acting talent, but she’s been growing on me ever since her performance as Elizabeth Bennet in the marvelous 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice. She’s surprisingly convincing in the sequence where the youthful Georgiana holds her own in witty dinner-party conversation with Whig statesman Charles Fox — it’s not every young actress who has Knightley’s talent for high-style vivacity.
Ralph Fiennes has the opposite talent: he excels at playing men without an ounce of vivaciousness in them. That description certainly applies to the Duke of Devonshire, whose favourite way of expressing himself is a mildly curious grunt. And yet, in some ways, he’s The Duchess’ pivotal character: you can’t be sure if his callous treatment of Georgiana makes him an aberration or if he’s simply a man of his time.
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