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THE DUCHESS Keira Knightley and Dominic Cooper

          Outstanding and original playwright Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen have done an astute job on converting Amanda Foreman’s biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, into a screenplay.  This 18^th century ancestress of Princess Diana was similar in the ways that count to mainstream audiences.  She was a gorgeous fashionista, locked into an arranged marriage with a member of the nobility who not only took a mistress but chose Georgiana’s best friend, Lady Elizabeth (Bess) Foster, and moved her and her three sons into their mansion. 

          Georgiana, whom her husband calls “G”,  is too spirited to take that lying down.  Drinking and gambling can only take you so far.  It’s inevitable that she takes a lover, childhood friend Charles Gray, an ambitious politician.  When she becomes pregnant with his baby, a cruicifying conflict ensues.  Will she abandon her three children with the Duke or her child with Charles? 

          This screenplay makes the conflict all about children which makes these shallow beauties barely bearable.  Bess tells G she has become the Duke’s mistress because he is the most powerful peer in England and the only person who can wrest her three sons from her abusive husband to live with her.  She also stands up to the Duke and accompanies Georgiana to the country when she gives birth to Charles Gray’s child who is turned over at the Duke’s insistence to Charles’s father or else Charles’s career will be destroyed and Georgiana will never see her children again.

          In typical 18^th century style, Georgiana manages to have her cake and eat it, too.  She remains Duchess of Devonshire and visits Eliza, her daughter with Charles, on the sly.  The Duke is played by Ralph Fiennes with an autocratic droit de seigneur but Fiennes is too fine an actor not to display touches of humanity, even in a man who is basically interested in nothing but his dogs and having his own way.  He always has, he always well.  He has his mistress, he has his Duchess and when she dies, he marries Bess with Georgiana’s blessing.

          One wonders how Princess Diana’s life would have played out.

          As written G has a certain survivalist toughness, a desire from early youth to be a Duchess and a star, and a strong maternal instinct which humanizes her.  Beautiful Keira Knightley takes her that far and no farther.  Her Georgiana is a shallow ambitious beauty whose disappointments made her a gambler and an alchoholic.  There’s no hint of the Duchess’s supposed with, intelligence and political passion. 

Dominic Cooper is dashing as Charles Gray but it’s hard to imagine him as the inspiration for our delicate and beloved Earl Grey tea.

Hayley Atwell as Bess is not well served by her costumes but interprets Hatcher’s vision of a woman who is grounded, sympathetic and a survivalist with an eye to the main chance.

          It’s a gorgeous film to watch.  Director Saul Dibbs lingers voluptuously on the luscious costumes and lofty rooms, conveying the sense of 18^th century royal life .  If the film has a message, it’s to make life work any which way you can.