The Duchess

Related Content

• "Coriolanus": Another Unnecessary Shakespeare Adaptation
  February 1, 2012
• Win Tickets To See Sean Price and Company at Mighty Tomorrow Night
  November 19, 2010
• Art Review: Greg Gossel: "Sleepwalking" at White Walls
  June 16, 2010
• The Life of the Mind
  December 14, 2011
• "A Dangerous Method": Cronenberg Examines the Birth of Psychoanalysis
  December 14, 2011

More About

• Saul Dibb
• Keira Knightley
• Princess Diana
• Georgiana Spencer
• Amanda Foreman

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Based on Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire, Saul Dibb's costume drama tells how Princess Diana's 18th-century ancestor (played here by Keira Knightley)—a naive ingénue married off in her teens to a fornicating icy stiff (get the parallel?)—grew into a politically sophisticated woman. Cruising lightly over Georgiana's activism, Dibb firmly turns the spotlight on her love life, in which she must come to terms with a ménage à trois at home and a passionate love affair with Charles, Earl of Grey (an incongruously laddish Dominic Cooper), a future prime minister and namesake of the posh tea. But for all its frisky high jinks, brocaded homes, and creamy bosoms, The Duchess is a tragedy about the terrifying vulnerability of even the richest women in a society that deprives them of property rights. As a tale of mature self-sacrifice, the movie would be almost unbearably moving were it not for Knightley's insubstantial performance, which allows her to be fatally upstaged by Ralph Fiennes—who, despite having played many a stiff quite stiffly, has bags of fun here playing Georgiana's husband: a jerk, but also a man of his time who's not oblivious to the happiness of the women in his life.
Oct. 31-Nov. 13, 2008