The Duchess

Sometimes writing bad reviews can be quite fun, the very act of destroying a film through words can be quite an entertainment in itself. Sadly though I take no pleasure in what I am about to do to this film. I decided to see Keira Knightley's new film The Duchess, in spite of generally bad reviews, because of three things : firstly, Ralph Fiennes was supposed to be excellent; secondly it has Charlotte Rampling, who I consider to be the finest actress of the new century and thirdly it had a writing credit from Anders Thomas Jensen, which immediately sparked my interest.

The film is an abject failure on multiple levels. It is the real life story of how a woman (Rampling) arranges for her young daughter (Knightley) to marry the Duke of Devonshire (Fiennes). He is only interested in providing a male heir and the new Duchess becomes quickly disillusioned with the match. He goes on to behave like a complete cad and she becomes a celebrity famed for her fashion. So why does it fail? Because the filmmakers have no idea what story they're telling or how to tell it.

The acting is emblematic of this, Fiennes excels in a handful of scenes but there is a scene right at the end where you see all this duality in his performance, the subtlety in his expressions is quite incredible ... but director Saul Dibb has completely missed all of this up until this moment because he's been too busy giving Keira close-up after close-up. Keira's performance highlights all of her limitations as an actress. It's not the role, it's just that she is far too mannered in her approach to make herself be the character rather than someone "acting". Equally those mannerisms are so modern they belie the character and setting she's in - again, I blame the director more than her for this - at times she looks like a girl playing dress-up rather than the envy of sophisticated society (this is, I suppose, what happens when you get the director of Bullet Boy to do a costume drama). Even worse is that the role requires emotions she cannot express satisfactorily on camera yet. It demands a deep melancholy and sadness, combined with the ability to portray maternal love, yet all she can do is pull faces and hope the music will carry her through. It doesn't. One of her final scenes should have been like Paul Giamatti meeting his wife at the wedding in Sideways, instead of feeling all the characters' pain in that moment you just see Keira trying to do half of what Giamatti did and failing because ... she can't hope to act as well as him because he's so much more talented.

The script adds its fair share of problems, the character Hayley Atwell plays is key in terms of plot but she is totally 2-Dimensional and she does things, then explains coldly afterwards, we never see the conflict and this severely weakens the relationships between the characters and the drama that unfolds. Dominic Cooper's "love interest" for Keira is another which is extremely underwritten and added to his limp performance makes it virtually impossible for the audience to engage in that side of the story. This is another problem, they don't know whether to go for the miseries of the marriage and importantly how that can be reconciled, or whether to play up the tragic love story in there - they end up trying to do both and all that ensures is neither is handled competently because in going for the latter you complicate the resolution of the former (especially if you try to do the one immediately after the other).

So this film is mishandled in practically every major department (the costumes admittedly are lovely, but the cinematography no more than adequate and the score horribly overbearing and intrusive). It turns out that Jensen writing credit is because Suzanne Bier was originally signed on to direct and that is the biggest tragedy of all here in that a proven director/writer combination of that calibre would surely have made a good film. Instead we have a director completely mis-suited to the genre, with a complete lack of understanding of the story and the characters. It's a complete failure in terms of story and execution and even game turns from Fiennes and Rampling (who unwittingly show up their inexperienced counterparts in every scene they share) cannot save this film from the depths of tedium, when it could have and should have been so much more.