Entertainment Ave! In Your House - A movie/DVD review of The Duchess.

The Duchess Movie Stats & Links
Starring:	Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Hayley Atwell
MPAA Rated:	PG-13
Released By:	Paramount Home Video
Kiddie Movie:	Probably not unless you want them to be a designer of old, English clothing.
Date Movie:	You better be watching this with a girl around.
Gratuitous Sex:	There is some.
Gratuitous Violence:	Sadly there is a bad sex scene.
Action:	Nope.
Laughs:	Nah.
Memorable Scene:	None.
Memorable Quote:	Nothing really.
Directed By:	Saul Dibb
Cool Things About the DVD
Learn French!	It's got some language subtitles and stuff.
Buy a New TV!	Not really necessary but it looks better on the widescreen.
Buy a New Stereo!	This movie won't be the one to make you upgrade your stereo.
Anything Else!	If you buy/rent this, watch the special features, especially the "Making of..." and "In Her Own Words" ones, before watching the movie. It will help your enjoyment of the movie immensely.

"The Duchess" tells the tale of Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley) who became the Duchess of Devonshire when she married William Cavendish (Ralph Fiennes), who was, well, the Duke of Devonshire. In the movie we follow the Duchess’ life from her mother setting her up to get married so that the Duke could have a son, all the way through to the results of her affair with Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper), ending finally with a quick little aside of how things went when she died. Through it all we learn how the Duchess developed a lust for life, and in a world when women were mostly taking back seats to the men, she loved to put herself in the spotlight. We find that with her public life she became a bastion of fashion, was able to influence politics, and loved to gamble, which seems like just a life of fun. Sadly her life wasn’t all that, as the movie also portrays the sadness and crappiness her marriage to the Duke had been, even being betrayed by her best friend, Lady Elizabeth (Hayley Atwell).

So we have the story of a famed Duchess, a life that has all of the feistiness and drama to make an interesting movie, but for me, and even for my BFF who watched it with me, the movie ended up not that interesting, and I think the reason for that is that the movie folks tried to cram nearly too much of the Duchess’ life into an hour and fifty minutes instead of maybe just concentrating on one aspect of it, because, quite honestly, none of the excitement and trials of her life came to light until I watched the extras on the DVD, that related her life to things I could then understand, like even back then there was a version of the paparazzi she had to deal with. Watching the movie I just didn’t get it.

The thing that also bums me out about the movie is that Keira Knightley was great in her performance, and I don’t know if the Duke was a quiet dope in his real life, but the only time Ralph Fiennes seemed to bring life to the performance was in a scene confronting both Georgiana and Lady Elizabeth, and that seemed like a total waste.

I suppose if you are interested in British history and want to see a nice portrayal of a fabled duchess, or if you just like seeing women in fancy gowns, you will probably love "The Duchess," but I’m not, and I don’t care, and I didn’t like "The Duchess" until I watched the extras on the DVD and then I went "Oh, now I get it." With that I’m going to give "The Duchess" 2 stars out of 5 as a stand-alone movie, but if you watch the "Making ‘The Duchess’" and "Georgiana In Her Own Words" before you actually watch the movie, you might like it a little more.