There’s nothing like a movie about 18th-century England to make 21st-century Americans feel all smug and morally superior. Based on Amanda Foreman’s biography Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (now retitled to match, and be promoted by, the movie), Saul Dibb’s film traces the life of Georgiana Spencer, who in 1774, on her 17th birthday, married William Cavendish and became the wife of the fifth duke of Devonshire, one of the richest and most powerful peers in the land. She herself was a celebrated beauty and fashion plate (Gainsborough and Reynolds painted her), the hostess of a political salon and a campaigner for the Whig Party. But it wasn’t all clotted cream and strawberries: her best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster, became her husband’s mistress and moved in with them, and the duke’s only male heir didn’t arrive till 1790. She died in 1806, of an abscess on her liver.
The Duchess touches lightly on all of this. It barely hints at Georgiana’s drinking problem (she does always seem to have a glass in her hand) and her massive gambling debts and her possible lesbian relationship with Bess. As for the American Revolution and then the French, we might as well be in China. Keira Knightley, who doesn’t have a period bone in her body (she was previously seen making a mockery of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet), gets the title role, and she fills it by going into a heavy-breathing panic attack whenever the duke asserts the era’s male prerogative. Hayley Atwell was too modern for Evelyn Waugh’s Julia in this summer’s remake of Brideshead Revisited, and she has no clue what to make of Bess. Charlotte Rampling as Georgiana’s mother is out to prove that in the 18th century English women were just as stiff and constipated as English men. As the man Georgiana really loves but isn’t allowed to be with, Charles Grey (who would become prime minister in 1830), Dominic Cooper is as fecklessly callow as he was as Willoughby in Masterpiece Theatre’s recent Sense and Sensibility. Cast adrift in this sea of vapidity is Ralph Fiennes, whose duke would honor Shakespeare, all hysterical outrage and entitlement one moment, all inarticulate guilt the next.
The film ends with Georgiana and Bess and their children running around a fountain, now united in feminist solidarity against Big Bad Bill; over that we read that Georgiana gave her blessing to the marriage of Bill and Bess after her death. (This might be news to Foreman.) Of course, The Duchess isn’t about Georgiana; it’s about her great-great-great-grandniece, Diana Spencer. Our heroine marries into one of the great families of the land but is spurned by her husband; she can’t break away and find true love or they’ll take her children from her; and after her death, he marries the woman he wanted all along. The only thing Dianaphiles will miss is, over the end credits, Elton singing “Candle in the Wind.” 110 minutes | Boston Common + Fenway + Fresh Pond + Chestnut Hill + Suburbs
