Hollywood has never had an awful lot of respect for history, so it’s hardly necessary for me to say that any resemblance to the characters in The Duchess to the actual fifth duke of Devonshire and his wife is both arbitrary and unimportant. The failure to be bridled by historical accuracy only helped make the recent royal melodrama The Other Boleyn Girl one of the most trashily entertaining movies of the year.

The Duchess isn’t quite in that league, but it’s aiming for the same audience, Anglophiles who like to read feminist struggle into the history of English royalty. Georgiana, the duchess of Devonshire from 1774 to 1806, was noted as a public figure who attracted a salon of literary and political figures, and who even wielded influence in the political affairs of the day. In private, though, she suffered a bad arranged marriage to a duke who was interested only in a male heir. As one character notes, “The duke is the only man in London not in love with his wife,” and the marriage was publicly satirized in Sheridan’s still-performed play School for Scandal.

Did I mention that Georgiana’s family name was Spencer? Yes, those Spencers, though it’s to the credit of director Saul Dibb that he doesn’t try to draw any more parallels to the life of Diana Spencer than are already present in the script.

Lavishly produced, The Duchess isn’t lacking for eye candy. But it slights Georgiana’s public accomplishments in favor of her private sufferings, which mount until a tear-jerking ending milked for all it’s worth. Keira Knightley looks swell in the period costumes, but there’s not much that even a more accomplished actress could have done with this one-dimensional role. Far more interesting is Ralph Fiennes, who keeps sneaking unexpected bits of humanity into a role that seems to have been written as a mere bully. It’s to his credit that we want to know more about the duke than we do about his abused wife, whom this films reduces to the center of a conventional melodrama.

—m. faust