A nice looking costume drama.

Rating: 7/10 (5 December 2010)

The Duchess was advertised on the back of a very controversial advertising campaign, using Georgiana Cavendish's famous relative Princess Diana as a part of the marketing campaign. Despite this The Duchess is a decent, if standard costume drama.
Georgiana Cavendish (Keira Knightley) is an intelligence young woman from noble stock. At a young age she marries the much older man the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), one of the most powerful peers in the House of Lords and a wealthy landowner. She only marries him so that she could bore him a son. There marriage is complex, the Duke is cold and distance to his wife, particularly when she has daughters and he has affairs, including with Lady Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), Georgiana's best friend. But Georgiana becomes a major figure in England, being a fashion idol and a major supporter of the Whigs (in very loose terms Liberal) party. She is an idealist and she forms a close relationship with politician Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper).
I first thing I had to say is The Duchess is a very beautiful looking film. The costumes are grand and wonderful to look at. I'm sure there was a great amount of research and love and care from designer Michael O'Conner (who deserved his Academy Award). The Art Direction was also of a high end and there was a lot of detail put into this film. They wanted to get the feel for the period. The director Saul Dibb seemed to be influenced by Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon with the amount of candle light shots and wonderful historical settings in Bath and the countryside. Dibb did a good job trying to keep a good pace and there solid attempt to make an interesting film.
There is a good cast and Keira Knightley is growing as an actress. She has proved her talent in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement and she gives a really strong and believable and her range was tested. She is becoming the biggest name young costume actress around. Fiennes was good as always playing a emotionally distance man who only cared about himself. But we do not get to know much about him and is really much there in him. Many of the to other performances were typical and decent in a costumer drama and many of the characters are the usual characters that you would find. Charlotte Rampling has an interesting character as both Georgiana's best friend and the Duke of Devonshire's lover in what is a very complex relationship.
There are big ideas and themes in the film. The phase 'there were three people in our marriage' is taken to a new extreme with Georgiana having to life with the woman having an affair with her hubby. For politics and history nuts there is plenty to sink your teeth into with Georgiana becoming a major political campaigner for the Whigs and reform and even more surprising considering women did not have any say. Political ideas and philosophy were discussed in the film. Sexual politics was also a major theme in the film, showing the hypocrisy of the age that it was of for a man to have a mistress because it was the done but it was social suicide for woman to have affair. The Duchess also show that marriages in the aristocracy were made for political reasons and ensure that a land owner could give their land to a son: not love. If a landowner gave their land to a daughter then the people their married would inherit all the land. No many how intelligence a woman was men still held all the power and influence in the land.
I also have to praise Rachel Portman's string based score, which was fitting music for the time.
But as strong as film as the Duchess is, it does not do anything that stretches the genre.