“The DUCHESS” (Kiera Knightly & Ralph Fiennes)
Took in this period piece for $3 basically because I knew I could sit & watch Kiera be beautiful for an hour & a half & just about get my money’s worth off that alone... Unfortunately the way they presented her character, I had absolutely no sympathy for her plight whatsoever – The woman gets what she deserves...
The film pretty much opens with her mother (Charlotte Rampling) telling Georgiana(Knightly) The Duke of Devonshire (Fiennes) has ‘asked for her hand’ – ‘G’ wonders why since they’ve only met twice & he’s never shown any interest in her. Still, when her mother proudly announces that she will become a Duchess, G beams with pride at being ‘chosen’ for such a lofty title... So she’s just as superficial as The Duke (& her mother, for that matter) & when he turns out to be a chauvinistic blowhard that simply wants a ‘breed mare’ to give birth to an heir, why are we suppose to feel sorry for her? Poor little thing didn’t expect marrying a total stranger with a pompous title to be a poor choice?
So the movie just rolls on & on with one scene of obnoxious adulterous behavior after another until you really hope one of these cretins would pull out a gun & knock off the other so we can be rid of a least one stupid twit of a Duchess, or one snobbish ‘dictator’ Duke – But, alas, fair fans of the cinema, such a scene never takes place; it just rolls on & on & on until the ‘And here’s what happened to them the rest of their lives...’ paragraphs show up to let you know nothing exciting ever DOES happen to these boorish characters... & the worst of it is, they plaster so much make-up onto Kiera’s naturally pretty physiognomy that she isn’t all that attractive in many of her scenes... Oh, the injustice of it all - $3 shot down the drain!
3 comments:
I have the luxury of seeing independent films because I live on Queene Anne and I saw this when it first came out.
I didn't think it was too bad, after all it is a true story and I felt like I was spying on these two people you wouldn't know otherwise how they lived.
Now is this the performance that netted Fiennes his Golden Globe nomination. Or was it for The Reader ?
I HOPE it's for 'Reader' (Although the subject matter of that one kind of creeps me out too) What did Fiennes do in The Duchess other than look snooty & sneer at everyone?
I guess my main complaint was - why should we glorify these souless people by telling their story in the first place?
The Duchess got nominations in the categories that most people think it would.
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