In the opening scenes of filmmaker Saul Dibb's highly varnished tableau, Keira Knightley glows as the coltish 17-year-old affianced to England's most eligible bachelor (Ralph Fiennes), permitting herself to believe her mother's suggestion that she is his true love. To the pragmatic duke, who turns to ice in the face of his fiancee's ardent fire, she is a brood mare in corsets.
Where the duchess' great-great-great-great-niece Diana swiftly delivered a male heir and a spare to carry on the Windsor family line, Georgiana was considerably slower in the fulfillment paddock. Movingly, the film suggests that her need for tenderness and her husband's desire for more complaisant partners were an impediment.
Unloved in her marbled and marquetry prison, Georgiana sought affection outside it. Garnishing chapeaus with ostrich plumes, lacing her wit with wine, she was the life of every party, including that of the Whigs. The duke was the pooper, trailing boredom in his shroudlike cloak.
As Dibb - and co-screenwriters Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen - tell it in the film adapted from Amanda Foreman's biography, the moody duke and merry duchess were an epic mismatch, as unthinkable a pair as Mr. Rochester and Elizabeth Bennet - or Voldemort and Hermione Granger.
The duchess was a soaring creature, so the earthbound duke clipped her wings - and in the film's most chilling scene, also her elaborately festooned bodice. (While the dresses, designed by Michael O'Connor, are smashing, the marital rape is shocking.)
