The Duchess (2008)
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Reviews Counted: 163
Fresh: 100 | Rotten: 63
While The Duchess treads the now-familiar terrain of the corset-ripper, the costumes look great and Keira Knightley's performance is stellar in this subtly feminist, period drama.
Average Rating: 6.5/10
Critic Reviews: 40
Fresh: 27 | Rotten: 13
While The Duchess treads the now-familiar terrain of the corset-ripper, the costumes look great and Keira Knightley's performance is stellar in this subtly feminist, period drama.
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Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 67,459
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Movie Info
Director Saul Dibb takes the helm for this period drama adapted from Amanda Foreman's best-selling novel Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, documenting the romantic entanglements of Georgiana Cavendish (Keira Knightley), a beautiful and clever woman who becomes a celebrity of British high society when she marries the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) and becomes consort to one of the most powerful men in England. Beloved for her trend-setting fashion designs as well as her political activism,
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Cast
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Keira Knightley
Georgiana Spencer -
Ralph Fiennes
Duke of Devonshire -
Charlotte Rampling
Lady Spencer -
Dominic Cooper
Earl Grey -
Hayley Atwell
Lady Bess Foster -
Simon McBurney
Charles Fox -
Aidan McArdle
Richard Sheridan -
John Shrapnel
Gen. Grey -
Alistair Petrie
Heaton
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All Critics (167) | Top Critics (40) | Fresh (103) | Rotten (66) | DVD (18)
This is a wonderful film.
There's something really special about Kiera Knightly in these period pieces.
It chronicles the saga of a vibrant and forward-thinking woman hampered by the constraints of a rigid society.
It's disturbingly shallow, focused so tightly on one woman's feelings of repression and loneliness that it lacks any perspective on their causes.
The Duchess is clearly Knightley's movie, ultimately rising or falling on her performance. She's up to the task, capturing both the charm and grace that made Georgiana so captivating.
Fiennes, an actor who disappears into roles like ice in a teacup, makes the Duke a complex and almost sympathetic figure, a bulky, unappealing man whose interests are in all the wrong things.
The Duchess doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a comfortable, low-calorie morsel of historical drama.
a refreshing look at British royalty, and it will curb your want to be part of that era, age and societal level
Yet another period piece about a progressive, fashionable woman constrained by the strict mores of her time, The Duchess is a gear-grindingly familiar romantic drama cloaked in sumptuousness.
Everything you'd expect it to be: a well-acted British period piece with lavish attention to period detail, about discontented characters in a royal family. And that's about it.
At its simplest, it's a gorgeous film with beautiful period costumes and intricate set designs. However, something tells me that's not the level director Saul Dibb wanted to achieve greatest on.
Knightley and Cooper don't ever generate much in the way of chemistry.
Just as the characters themselves seem indifferent to one another, so do we as an audience feel indifferent toward them. (Blu-ray Edition)
Willing to settle for all-around competency instead of excavating history for deeper insights, leaving audiences with another undemanding genre placeholder. [Blu-ray]
The Blu-ray and DVD versions provide the same extras, although you'll be impressed by the filming locations and costumes if you view the 1080p high definition Blu-ray.
Deserves credit for playing things straight %u2013 complete with its moral quagmire and inherent sadness. The performances of Knightley, Fiennes and Atwell really make it work.
...plays like a Masterpiece Theater adaptation of an eighteen-century soap opera.
Not just another royal goddess in a gilded cage costume drama, the film couldn't be more current now, when women bidding for the highest political offices are told to go home and take care of their kids or iron male shirts. Sexual subversion in corsets.
Audience Reviews for The Duchess
Super Reviewer
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- Georgiana Spencer: I thought he'd be like Papa but he never talks to me he seems to care more about his dogs.
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- Georgiana Spencer: Of all the women in England, you had to throw yourself on her. I have never objected to any of your affairs. I have accepted whatever arrangement you have proposed. But this... I have one single thing of my own. Why couldn't you let me keep Elizabeth for myself? She is my sole comfort in our marriage. You have robbed me of my only friend! I want her out!
- Duke of Devonshire: Well I couldn't ask her of that.
- Georgiana Spencer: What is wrong with me?
- Duke of Devonshire: As a husband I have fulfilled my obligations you have not.
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- Georgiana Spencer: Do you think of me when we're not together?
- Earl Grey: You ought to know I do.
- Georgiana Spencer: You hesitated before you replied
- Earl Grey: No, I'm unused to being asked so directly. And by you of all people. I think of you all the time. I always have.
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Foreign Titles
- Die Herzogin (DE)







Top Critic
Sometimes a film is not so much about what it shows you on the screen, but what it infers by innuendo and association. The Duchess is such a film, and it suffers for it.
What is allegedly relevant for the film is that said Duchess is a Spencer, and as such, is an ancestor to everyone's darling, Lady Di. The film attempts to draw parallels, showing how the Duchess was an intelligent, strong willed young woman sucked into a marriage of opportunity in 1774 - to which, one infers that she is just like her descendant. The film goes to great length to further this concept, showing ad nauseum all the trappings of being forced into an arranged and loveless marriage; wherein her sole duty is to produce a son and heir for the duke. That she rails against the system makes a sort of feminist statement, and while I abhor the duke and everything he stood for (the assumption of power and moral certitude based on your birthright), and sympathize with any person forced into any contract without their consent - you didn't see this duchess, or Di refusing all the jewels and trappings of royalty. But enough with the socio/political statements, let's discuss the film itself.
The cinematography is top shelf and the sets and costumes beautiful, and I suppose you can't really blame Ms. Knightly in the title role - she does the best she can given the material she has to work with. The same can be said for Ralph Fiennes, who aptly plays the stuffy, pompous Duke, who while being an expert manipulator and politician, has some serious issues when it comes to expressing actual emotion.
Emotion is what appears to be lacking throughout the film - moments that are meant to be heartbreaking aren't fully grounded by any back-story so they lose much of their potential potency. There are parallels to the film Possession, involving the sacrifices made for children. In Possession the scenes are emotionally powerful, in The Duchess, all the emotion is sucked away, as what should have been an emotional reunion becomes an empty thirty seconds of film.
There was potential here that, with a bit more care, focus and development, could have made a wonderful film. Alas, all the attempts to portray the duchess as special and beloved by the people become nothing more than gratuitous scenes of empty pageantry where the duchess spoke, but didn't say anything truly impressive, a fault of the script writer yet again.
There are some bedroom scenes thrown in for good measure (it seems a pre-requisite for all period piece dramas), though they are flat and emotionless, even a pseudo rape somehow simply seems matter of fact; as if reading a passage in a pot-boiler novel "ah yes, he took her hard, and without her consent" - not much emotional energy there.
Throughout it seemed as if the film was at war with itself - wanting to show the Spencer parallel with a modern carnal sensibility, yet caught in the malaise of gentrified manners while the gossip mongers hinted of infidelities and scandal. It played like a well costumed soap opera until the film finally ran out of things to say and ended up using my least favorite film device: the written narrative conclusion - something that also seems a pre-requisite of quasi historical dramas. Kind of a "they lived happily (or not) ever after" effect. To me, if there was something important you wanted to impart to your audience, you find a way to show it and not resort to such a sloppy stunt. In this case the narrative informed us that shortly before her death the duchess gave her consent for her friend to marry her husband and become the new duchess. But wait a minute!!! The duchess was some 20 years younger than her husband - WTF?? What happened? How did she die before he did? I would have thought that this would have made for a far more interesting tale than the pointless semi political scenes that the film included in a misguided attempt to show some historical perspective.