BOTTOM LINE: Yet another film with Keira Knightley in a corset; it's very average with bland characters, even if it does offer some insight in to the nature of 18th Century English society.

THE GOOD: One of the advantages of a period film such as this one is that you have the ability to immerse yourself in a whole other world and in terms of production design, costume and photography, "The Duchess" really excels. Every visual detail has been meticulously detailed which makes it much easier to get in to the story of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire (Keira Knightley) who is married off to the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) when she is seventeen. In the beginning, she feels tremendous excitement at marrying in to the top end of high society, but it all goes pear-shaped fairly quickly when it becomes blatantly obvious that the Duke's only interest in her is to produce a son and nothing else. From day one, they barely talk and as time passes, the Duke has affairs left, right and centre but the Duchess is powerless to do anything about it. She was contracted to produce an heir for the Duke and unfortunately, she keeps having girls. As a result, the Duke is very harsh on the Duchess for much of the film, and it's hard not to feel a certain level of sympathy for the Duchess and her plight, especially when the Duke has an affair with the Duchess' best friend and the Duchess is powerless to expel her friend from the house because the Duke wants to keep her, leading to some very awkward dinner sequences between the three characters. One of the aspects that works well in this film is the window in to 18th century social practices, particularly the treatment of women in marriages like these and how so much has changed since those times. A classic example of this occurs when the Duchess finally does produce a son and the Duke hands over a cheque as payment for services rendered. "The Duchess" has some noble intentions to its story, and really excels in the technical aspects of production.

THE BAD: The film is bland, and the characters are nothing of interest. Keira Knightley is the gravitating centre of the film; she does a decent enough job but she does nothing to distinguish her character from any others you'll see in other period films. That's not all her fault as the script does not give her much to work with. Ralph Fiennes is the real waste in this film; he's one of the best actors in the world and his role is so boring and two dimensional that they could have given the role to any one. To his credit, he does manage to inject a little more dimension in the final major scene between the Duke and Duchess where he imparts a certain level of sympathy for his wife and his cruel treatment of her, suggesting that he was only doing what was expected of him. All things being equal, this film lacks any real drama, largely due to its predictable nature, uninteresting characters, and the sense that we've already seen things like this before.