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A
woman of the world: Knightley in The Duchess.
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A
Woman’s Place
By
Laura Leon
The
Duchess
Directed
by Saul Dibb
Keira Knightley is a rare breed, a lovely young woman who
can look oh-so-modern on the runway, but who, on screen, morphs
perfectly into what we’d imagine to be the epitome of another
century’s grace. Whether she’s swashbuckling in laced bodice
and britches, or running across Austenian meadows in fluffy
petticoats and snowy cap, she’s a romance heroine come to
life—sort of. This quality has its downside, namely assuming
that she’s nothing but a dress-up doll, a fetching mannequin
on which to drape sumptuous fabrics and wait for the masses
to come.
Watching The Duchess, however, one can’t help but notice
that Knightley has come a long way from the chin-jutting minx
of Pirates of the Caribbean. While I wouldn’t yet label
her an artist, it’s clear, in her evocative portrayal of Georgiana,
the Duchess of Devonshire, that she’s gained confidence and
learned that subtlety and understatement are essential tools
of her craft. Based on a book by Amanda Foreman, and directed
by Saul Dibb (who cowrote the script with Anders Thomas Jensen
and Jeffrey Hatcher), The Duchess is a statement about
the role of women in society—in particular, their utter powerlessness—disguised
as a period-piece soap opera. Teenage Georgiana, when informed
by her mother, Lady Spencer (Charlotte Rampling), that she’s
to become the bride of the much older Duke William (Ralph
Fiennes), gushes, “Does he love me?” In this manner, we realize
that despite accepting the fact that she’s been bred to, well,
breed, preferably to a moneyed and titled family, this miss
is enough of an innocent as to think that love ever has anything
to do with it. Fast-forward several years, and we see Georgiana
happily tending to her three daughters (one a product of the
Duke’s fling with a maid) during the day while reigning supreme
over high society at night.
The fly in the ointment of the duchess’s life is her “inability”
to bear the Duke any sons, a lack whose presence he makes
achingly clear in all interactions with his wife. While Georgiana
displays political acumen in her conversations with the Whig
politician Charles Fox (Simon McBurney) and his heir presumptive,
Charles Gray (Dominic Cooper), and is kindness itself, William
seems nothing more than a chilling case of entitlement. His
best conversation is directed at his beloved dogs. When dinner
guests bore him, he simply leaves the table. When Georgiana
provokes him by proposing that, since he’s moved his mistress,
Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), into their home, he shouldn’t
mind if she take up with her true love, Gray, his response
is shockingly brutal. His reaction may seem at odds with the
gentility of his line, but filmmaker Dibb is keen to make
us think about the barbarities of the marriage contract, and
to wonder if things have really changed all that much. For
his part, Fiennes gives a tremendously moving performance,
somehow making us, by film’s end, see more than callousness
and incivility. Rather, he comes across as the product of
a long line bound by duty and expectation, unable to come
to terms with the vitality and sass of his wife, and deep
down aggrieved at his own inability to be anything other than
who he is. It’s a triumph.
The movie gets a little nauseating when Georgiana, stifled
within the confines of society, seeks refuge in Gray’s arms.
The problem here is that Dominic Cooper is a lightweight;
he comes across as an overeager beagle bounding onto his mistress’s
lap. The fact that Georgiana can follow a political speech,
or that Gray can make one, is not sufficient to make us believe
that either one of them is all that special.
But Dibb and company are more concerned with the possibility
of what Georgiana could have, and what she must settle for.
In this way, they make a few unadvised comparisons to the
more modern, now departed, Lady Spencer. To compare Knightley’s
fresh vitality and evident intelligence to the late Princess
of Wales is cheap theatrics. At its best, The Duchess
stays on point with its sweeping vistas and sumptuous interiors
a stark contrast to its main characters’ Spartan inner lives,
and by showing that Knightley is far more than the sum of
her outrageous wigs and bustles.
War
of Terror
Body
of Lies
Directed
by Ridley Scott
Adapted by A-list screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed)
from the novel by Washington Post foreign affairs columnist
David Ignatius, Body of Lies is about the labyrinthine—and
far from humanitarian—antiterrorism efforts of the CIA in
the Middle East. Directed by Ridley Scott, the film is slick
and exciting (“I’m not getting my head cut off on the Internet,
if something goes wrong, shoot me,” says an Arab recruit).
And it’s got plenty of star power: Leonardo DiCaprio is Roger
Ferris, a Tarzanesque agent with ethics stationed in Iraq,
and Russell Crowe is his CIA superior, Ed Hoffman, a ruthless
operator who believes that no life should be spared to keep
America safe from Islamic extremists. The combination of authentic
source material and Scott’s visual acumen makes Body of
Lies the most compelling terrorism thriller since Syriana.
Ferris, who speaks Arabic (DiCaprio is very recognizable even
in a scraggly beard and dyed-black hair), is infiltrating
a terrorist cell when he gets a lead on the whereabouts of
a high-level Al Qaeda bomber. In a CIA confabulation-gone-wrong,
his cover is blown and he gets shot up. After taking control—or
so he thinks—of the operation from Hoffman, he returns to
the pursuit in Jordan. With the flair of visualizing military
strategies that he showed in Black Hawk Down, Scott
maneuvers Ferris’ course of extreme danger and psychological
gamesmanship. Hoffman follows Ferris’ every move by satellite
surveillance, without regard for Ferris’, or anyone else’s,
safety.
At the heart of the film’s triangulated web of espionage are
the use, misuse, and consequences of deceit. To Hoffman, lying
is an integral part of the job, which forces Ferris to team
up with the Jordanian head of intelligence, Hani Salaam (Mark
Strong). Saalam answers only to the king of Jordan, and he
deals harshly with those who break his policy of honesty.
Conundrums abound. “You are not capable of secrecy because
you are a democracy,” asserts Salaam, who sees the difference
between secrecy and deceit more definitively than the Americans.
Yet despite his respect for his Jordanian ally, Ferris resorts
to duplicity.
The plot encounters most of the issues of the war on terrorism,
and does so incisively, though it presents the extremists
in a more favorable light than is relevant to the film’s view
of religious zealotry. (Monahan also scripted Scott’s Eastern-leaning
crusades actioner, Kingdom of Heaven.) Body of Lies
also gets overly convoluted by the subplots of Hoffman’s subterfuges.
But Crowe’s performance—Hoffman oozes Southern cordiality
even as he’s pulling the strings—is such that his machinations
add to the suspense. DiCaprio blazes intensity as an agent
on the edge; Ferris believes in his work, but as he rails
in the film’s most memorable diatribe, the war’s methodology
is an insane travesty. And in that, he speaks the truth.
—Ann
Morrow
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