'Duchess' is more than a prissy costume drama

THE ROYALS have kept us mightily entertained in modern times with their martyred, fashion-plate princess, stuffy prince, Fergie rocker, horsey Anne and Academy Award winning Lizzy II. The 18th century cast was just as racy.

Give this crowd enough money and power and they're going to party. "The Duchess" is not a prissy costume period drama in which folks just pass the tea and stroke the ostrich feathers of their plumed chapeaus. Yes, taffeta and chemise are rustling everywhere, and plenty of sexual shenanigans are going on.

Let us count the ways. First of all, there is a 17-year-old virgin, Georgiana Spencer, who is bartered off to the Duke of Devonshire, one of the richest and most powerful of all the swells. She's beautiful and independent. He rapes her on their wedding night. She, quite understandably, doesn't like the brute and contents herself by giving big parties and becoming the darling of all London society.

She likes wine and card gambling. She apparently never wears the same dress twice. He frowns. Every man in England, besides her husband, is ga-ga over her. He finds a more submissive, agreeable mistress, Lady Bess, who is separated from her husband and forbidden to see her children.

Bess and Georgiana are friends and eventually merge, so to speak, to form a live-in ménage à trois. Georgiana, the titular duchess, has provided no heir, which is her greatest sin, but the girl knows how to party.

With the husband still frowning and wearing all black and gray shrouds, she, predictably, takes a lover.

There's enough here to fill up at least two months of plotting for "Search for Tomorrow."

Keira Knightley is stunning as the duchess, quickly maturing at age 23 into a key interpreter of British period drama.

Knightley is more a movie star than an actress, but in an era of grim grit we are in dire need of a new movie star. Having won an Oscar nomination for her rural Jane Austen outing in the latest remake of "Pride & Prejudice" (2005), she continued her lucky box-office run with the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series and another period piece in "Atonement."

She is not up to the call, though, of suggesting the frustration of a fiery bird who would like to rattle the bars of her gilded cage. The glamour is there but not the rebellion.

Ralph Fiennes steals the film when it comes to the acting category because his Duke of Devonshire is not totally a villain. Due to Fiennes' complexity in the part, we can understand his power and his feeling that his wife is just a silly flirt who, worst of all, has not produced a male heir.

Lady Bess Foster, the mistress, is played by Hayley Atwell. Some are hailing her as a new discovery, but there is little about her that is distinctive.

Dominic Cooper, one sup-poses, is meant to be a strikingly handsome tempter who lures the duchess from her husband, but he looks rather ordinary and threadbare for the part. He seems to be the stud of the moment for British casting directors because of "The History Boys" and the unstructured "Mamma Mia!" In any case, he serves the plot. He plays Charles Grey, who went on to have a tea named for him and become prime minister. It is she who uses her social power to promote his emerging Whig party.

There is much more to the Duchess of Devonshire's story. In the background, King George has gone nuts, and the colonists have declared their independence. This could have been a great movie, not just a good one, if it had captured its historical setting as well as the sexual intrigue.

Saul Dibb, the director, had his beginnings in television documentaries. His style here, as gorgeous as it is, is but a pale reminder of Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," which has some of the most strikingly lighted interiors of any movie ever made. (Rent it.) This film, though, is gorgeous to look at, complete with scenes that are as worthy of framing as any Gainsborough painting. Rather than sets, these are actual interiors of British locations, redecorated and polished.

Much has been made, predictably, of the fact that Georgiana Spencer was the great, great, great, great aunt of Diana Spencer, who, two centuries later, in 1981, walked down the aisle into a similar storm of publicity - becoming a fashion plate, the darling of the media and, ultimately, the subject of royal scandal and tragedy. The parallels are uncanny.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com