So that's how they did it

Last night, between noisy neighbors and an unfortunate acoustic proximity to Downtown Chicago, I ended up being awake to see in the new year. Since I had to be awake anyway, I decided to watch The Duchess, starring Kiera Knightley. I had actually been really interested in seeing this film because I had read the book, and I was wondering how they would convert the biography of such a pathetic woman into a feature film with a likeable main character.

Well, here's how they did it: They focused on only one highly sensational element and elided everything else.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was a political force in her day: a leading representative of the Whig party, a major supporter of American independence, and a close friend of Marie Antoinette. She was also completely without self esteem, addicted to drugs, alcohol and gambling, and died with the approximate equivalent of over $6 million in debt. Her best friends were her sister, Harriet, and Lady Elizabeth Foster, her husband's mistress and eventual wife, with whom the Duke and Duchess lived in a menage a trois for many many years.

The film, however, depicts her as approximately as politically powerful as Paris Hilton, offers one scene in which she is gambling (which she did nearly every night of her life for many years), one scene in which she is strung out (but, because the next scene makes reference to a new pregnancy, it's easy to be confused as to what the real problem in the scene had been), and her sister is entirely left out of the film.

Most startlingly, however, is the fact that the film shows a major blow-up between the Duke and Duchess where the Duchess demands he send Lady Elizabeth away. This is a very reasonable scene to assume would have happened to our 21st century values, but the Duchess's own letters to her family actually indicate that the opposite was true. The Duchess loved Lady Elizabeth like a sister and encouraged the relationship between her husband and her friend, and refused to allow her family to disparage her friend or criticize their arrangement.

Overall, the film is really well done and interesting, but only if you have no familiarity with the characters' actual lives or stories. It's always very difficult for me to see a film based on something I know about because I want the film to be faithful to the story. Faithfulness, however, isn't always the most interesting approach to a story, which makes it difficult to translate to the screen, which leaves me disappointed. But, the sets and the costumes are beautiful, including the crazy wigs the women wore (which would mean they would have had necks like wrestlers from holding them up). Ralph Fiennes is kind of disappointing in the film, since he plays the Duke so awkwardly.

So, if you like period costume dramas and don't know anything about the characters see the film. If you do know the characters, though, be prepared to be disappointed by the film's disregard for historical fact.