Knightley's ‘Duchess’ is a royal bore

By CHRISTOPHER KELLY

The director takes a workmanlike approach.

Why is it that the most aggressively art directed movies are so often the most artlessly directed?

The new period drama “The Duchess” unfolds in a series of painstaking appointed drawing rooms and bedchambers — not a doily is out of place. The actresses, including Keira Knightley and Charlotte Rampling, are bedecked in shimmering taffeta and chemise.

Yet for all that’s ravishing about the movie, which recounts the true-life story of 18th century British aristocrat Georgiana Spencer (the great-great-great-great aunt of Princess Diana), it never comes alive. Director Saul Dibb (the British miniseries “The Line of Beauty”) takes a workmanlike approach to overly familiar material — and the result leaves a bunch of gifted performers cast adrift.

Based on the non-fiction book “Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire” by Amanda Foreman (the screenplay is by Dibb, Anders Thomas Jensen and Jeffrey Hatcher), “The Duchess” opens with Georgiana aggressively flirting with a handsome young man named Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper). Her mother (Rampling), however, is busy arranging her marriage with the much older and wealthier Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes).

Georgiana enters into this union hopefully, but the Duke proves to be a cold fish, not to mention a bit of brute in bed. We settle in for what we hope will be a tale of aristocratic gamesmanship that turns violently sour, a la “Dangerous Liaisons.” Not quite. As played by Fiennes, who’s even more clammy and remote here than he was in “Quiz Show” and “The Constant Gardener,” the Duke never rises to the level of a villain we love to hate. He’s a drip when we meet him, and he only gets drippier.

The Duke soon takes a mistress, Lady Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), at which point, Georgiana decides that she should be allowed to take a lover, as well. Charles Grey re-enters the proceedings and the two of them begin a heated and scandalous affair. But, again, the casting is all off: Knightley doesn’t have the chops to convey to the sense of a woman rapidly losing control of her own desires. Cooper used his dimpled smile and lithe body to charm his way through “The History Boys” and “Mamma Mia,” but here he looks strangely bloated and sluggish — like Ryan O’Neal after he’s gone to seed in “Barry Lyndon.”

Speaking of “Barry Lyndon,” that Stanley Kubrick masterpiece seems to have been Dibb’s sole visual inspiration for “The Duchess.” Whole scenes of the earlier film are artfully reconstructed here, including an homage to the famous gambling table sequence, with Knightley doing her best Marisa Berenson impression. But Kubrick’s immaculate and ascetic style, which was crafted using all natural light, had a thematic purpose: He sought to bleed the lushness out of the costume drama and capture the raw and ruthless emotion at its core. In “The Duchess,” though, Dibb just seems to be copying Kubrick’s images solely because he thinks they look pretty.

Almost by accident, the director stumbles his way into one juicily entertaining sequence, in which Georgiana’s wig sets on fire — it’s the kind of over-the-top camp melodrama that the movie could have used much more of. Other than that, “The Duchess” is a belabored slog. We’re clearly supposed to see parallels between Georgiana’s life and Princess Diana’s, but since we care so little about Georgiana, the metaphor never really flowers. The relationship between Georgiana and Bess, meanwhile, would seem to be an intriguing story of a pair of enemies who eventually become comrades-in-arms — but by the time the screenplay gets around to tackling this subject, we’ve long since ceased paying attention.