Movie Review: The Duchess

Last Friday night I went to see The Duchess with one of my closest friends to cap off a pretty up and down week. I thought "hey a movie with pretty costumes, yeah!" Unfortunately there is only one word to describe this movie and that is adequate.

The plot in a nutshell involves a vibrant beauty, Lady Georgiana Spencer, who marries an older man, William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire and goes to live with him in his beautiful London mansion, Devonshire House. But she quickly learns that her husband prefers his dogs to her. She becomes a celebrity of her time and ends up trapped in an unhappy triangle with her husband and his live-in mistress. She falls passionately in love with an ambitious young politician, Charles Grey (later 2nd Earl Grey and Prime Minister, you know the one the tea is named after) and the affair causes a bitter conflict with her husband and threatens to erupt into a scandal.

Keira Knightley suffers beautifully as Georgiana but she is not given much more to do than to look hurt, and to be a clotheshorse. While she wears the costumes well, I was always conscious of how painfully thin she is, especially compared to the paintings of the real Georgiana. Ralph Fiennes manages to capture the essence of a man for whom duty and appearances were all. He manages to act with his entire body where as Knightley seems to act mostly with her jawline. However, the writers have included a scene between the Duke and Duchess that I found inexplicable and hard to deal with. There is a brilliant moment towards the end of the film where husband and wife try to reach out to each other if only briefly. Hayley Atwell, as Lady Bess, is not really given much to hang her character on. Did Bess love the Duke, was she calculating, or did she have genuine affection for Georgiana?

A movie of less than 2 hours can never hope to do justice to the complexities of the relationship between Georgiana, her husband, and Lady Bess Foster, nor does this movie even try. The film spends entirely too much time emphasizing the parallels between Georgiana and her however many greats niece, Lady Diana Spencer, future Princess of Wales. Hmm, let's see, both married older men who were emotionally distant, and who preferred the company of another woman, leaving the beautiful wife to flee into the arms of an adoring lover. However, Prince Charles never moved Camilla into Kensington or Buckingham Palace, forcing Diana to share living space with her rival. Nor were Camilla and Diana ever best friends the way Georgiana and Bess were.

The movie muddles up even the basic facts of the triangle. When Georgiana met Lady Bess in Bath, she had been married for about six years, and had yet to have her first child. The movie gets it right that she was hoping that taking the waters at Bath would help her to conceive. Lady Elizabeth Foster was the daughter of the Earl of Bristol. She and her sister, both seperated from their husbands, were living in genteel poverty when she met Georgiana. Soon the two women were bosom buddies, and Bess and the Duke were sharing long rides out in the countryside. Bess was hired initially as a governess to the Duke's illegitimate daughter Charlotte Williams, who she spent almost two years abroad with.

No one knows for sure when Lady Bess and the Duke became lovers. And Georgiana apparently didn't find out until it was revealed that Bess and the Duke had had a child together, Caroline St. Jules (who later married George Lamb, the brother-in-law of Lady Caroline Lamb). Bess seemed to fill a need in both the Duke and the Duchess. She gave Georgiana the affection and attention that she craved, and she seemed to be able to stroke the Duke's ego the way that Georgiana was incapable of doing. She was the linchpin that allowed the marriage to work between the Duke and Duchess. Instead in the movie, we never see the relationship develop between Bess and the Duke. Georgiana comes home one day and hears them in bed. When she asks Bess why, Bess explains her actions away by telling her that the Duke promised to help her gain access to her children (which for some reason the writers have given her three sons instead of two, perhaps to emphasize Georgiana's inadequacies more?)

The other problem with the movie is that the trio seem to exist in a bubble. The rest of Georgiana's, apart from her mother, doesn't exist in the film, nor does the Duke's. And how can they make a movie without the Prince of Wales? Especially since the Regency crisis occurred during the time period of the film. Instead, the audience is introduced to Charles James Fox, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan who function as sort of lackeys to Georgiana, you know in between writing plays and governing.

There is hardly any mention of what was going on in the outside world apart from a brief mention of the Whigs supporting the Americans in the Revolution and a fleeting reference to the revolution in France. Georgiana's life as a political hostess is completely truncated, nor does the audience get more than a glimpse of her gambling which was a serious addiction for her. During her lifetime, she was constantly fighting off her creditors, at certain points she owed over 100,000 pounds. She was also possibly anorexic or bulemic and addicted to opiates to deal with the hollowness of her life. She was also an author, who published her only novel at the age of twenty-one, as well as a poetess.

In the movie, Lord Charles Grey is depicted as her contemporary, when in reality he was 7 years her junior. When they met, she had finally given birth to two daughters, Little G and Harriet, always called Harryo, but the pressure to give birth to a son was overwhelming. Grey basically chased her, and she was flattered by his attentions. He wasn't her first affair, she'd already possibly been intimate with her good friend Charles James Fox, and she was very close to the Duke of Dorset, one of the great womanizers of the age (a man who had also had an affair with Bess). When the Duke tells Georgiana that she must end her relationship with Charles Grey because of the scandal, I had to laugh. As if living openly in a menage a trois was not scandal enough?

What the movie does get right is the heartbreaking moment when Georgiana has to give up her child by Grey. For the one thing that Georgiana loved more than anything was her children. She was an unusual mother for the time because she insisted on breast-feeding all her children. She was such a remarkable mother, that one of her daughters writing her a letter when she was an adult and a mother herself, remarked on what an absolutely wonderful mother she was.

For audience members who know nothing of the real story, I'm sure this lackluster treatment will suffice. For those of us who have read Amanda Foreman's masterful biography, one longs for what might have been if the book had been given the same lavish treatment and care that John Adams and Queen Elizabeth I had been given in recent miniseries.

I can only give this film a C+

Movie Review: Atonement

Last night I had the opportunity to attend a screening of the new film Atonement with James McAvoy, Keira Knightley and Romola Garai through the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It was so worth the money I spent on joining the Society, let me tell you.

Before the movie, I had a quick glass of wine at P.J. Clarke's at Lincoln Center which is this old fashioned looking bar and restaurant. The original is on the East Side on 55th Street and 3rd Avenue, where's it been since the early part of the last century. It's owned now by a consortium which includes Timothy Hutton, and they've opened two branches, one downtown in the financial district and one near Lincoln Center.

I had a nice of glass of reisling and the Oysters Rockefeller which contained a little too much spinach for my liking and I adore spinach. I had to dig through to find the oyster and the bottom, and they weren't exactly meaty which might explain all the greenage on my plate. It's kind of pricey but the bartenders are way cute, although it reminded me of that scene in Boys on the Side where Mary Louise Parker laments that after 5 years of Happy Hour, she'd only managed to go home with the bartenders.

Now to Atonement. I haven't read the Ian McEwen novel on which it's based, but now I definitely want to, just to fill in the gaps. Here's the description from Yahoo! Movies: In 1935, 13-year-old fledgling writer Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) and her family live a life of wealth and privilege in their enormous mansion. On the warmest day of the year, the country estate takes on an unsettling hothouse atmosphere, stoking Briony's vivid imagination. Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the educated son of the family's housekeeper, carries a torch for Briony's headstrong older sister Cecilia (Kiera Knightley). Cecilia, he hopes, has comparable feelings; all it will take is one spark for this relationship to combust. When it does, Briony - who has a crush on Robbie - is compelled to interfere, going so far as accusing Robbie of a crime he did not commit. Cecilia and Robbie declare their love for each other, but he is arrested - and with Briony bearing false witness, the course of three lives is changed forever. Briony continues to seek forgiveness for her childhood misdeed. Through a terrible and courageous act of imagination, she finds the path to her uncertain atonement, and to an understanding of the power of enduring love.

Well that's in in a nutshell. I had a hard time with this movie partly because I wasn't that innocent when I was 13, and I had to remember that 1935 was a different time, and that young girls like Briony wouldn't really know what to do with their budding feelings of sexuality. In fact, if I hadn't heard someone say that she was 13, I would have thought she was a lot younger, because she acted like she was no more than 10 or 11, while her cousin Lola is clearly a budding Lolita, who ends up seduced by a friend of Briony's brother Leon, which Briony mistakes for someone else. Briony is not the only one who has to atone for what's she done. Lola knows who her seducer is but lets Robbie take the blame, so that know one would know that she was a willing participant, and Paul Marshall wouldn't have gotten in trouble for seducing a minor.

The movie also exposes the class system in England. Cecilia and Briony's father had paid to put Robbie through college, but the minute he's accused of rape, they automatically assume that he must be guilty because he's lower class. There's never an inkling of doubt apart from Cecilia who believes in Robbie's innocence.

The jumping around in time and perspective took some getting used to as well. The audience sees certain scenes from both Briony's point of view and Cecelia and Robbie's. I also knew where the film was going at certain points, although there were still some surprises which I won't spoil here.

I think Keira Knightley is an incredibly beautiful actress but it was painful to look at her in her evening gown because she's so thin. Seriously, I just wanted to force feed her a hamburger. There's naturally thin and then there's bordering on emaciation, and she's about crossed the line. I thought she was cast perfectly in the role of Cecilia but for me the heart of the film is James McAvoy. His performance is full of passion and yearning, for Cecilia and for the life that was stolen from him by Briony. He's amazing and his range is incredible. When I think of his cocky Tom Lefroy, and now Robbie, and his role in Last King of Scotland, he' s a major talent.

And a sweetheart too. There was a Q&A after the movie with Christopher Hampton, the screenwriter, and James where he talked about his performance and making the film. He was so charming and funny, and a real gentleman. He actually apologized for taking the piss out of audience member who complained that the film became too melodramatic at the end. It was interesting to hear that Christopher Hampton literally had to audition for Ian McEwan (the author of the novel) for the job of writing the screenplay. Apparently McEwan, as one of the producers, had approval over who got the job. Luckily Christopher Hampton was approved, he was able to preserve the romantic atmosphere of the movie without it becoming too sentimental whereas Tom Stoppard might have been too cynical.

Adapting a book is always tricky. Most authors accept that when they take the money to have their book adapted, they have no control over what turns up on screen. Some authors, like Meg Cabot, have a wonderful sense of humor about it. Some, like Anne Rice, don't. The book will always exist, and hopefully viewers after seeing the movie, like myself, will be curious to read the book. I actually ended up enjoying Unbearable Lightness of Being when I read it, and I hated the movie. And I thought Prince of Tides was a much better book then what Barbra Streisand did to it.

What grade do I give this film? Well I have to give it a B+. At times it just felt too long, like the sequences in France around Dunkirk just seemed to go on for days. And I wasn't always convinced of the relationship with Cecilia and Robbie. It seemed forced, like the actors had no real chemistry, which is strange since James McAvoy said they had 3 weeks to rehearse. It might be because they spend so much time apart in the film, and because their relationship is never able to fully develop. Still it's worth it to see it for James McAvoy's performance as well as the young actress who plays Briony at 13.

Thanks for reading,

EKM