 Starring: Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Juliet Stevenson
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Year Of Release: 2002
Plot: Jess is a soccer mad teenage girl whose strict Sikh parents think she should be nice and demure so she can find a nice boy to marry, rather than running around kicking a ball and getting dirty. When Jess is offered a place on a women’s football team, she knows she must play in secret, but it brings her a new friend in Juliette, possible romance with her coach Joe, and the chance for a soccer scholarship in the US. However, it also inevitably sets her on a collision course with her parents. |
I’m not entirely sure what Keira Knightley is for. Bend It Like Beckham was the first film that really got her noticed by audiences. She’d previously appeared as Padme’s double in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (but behind make-up, so no one really knew it was her) and had a major role in the comparatively little seen The Hole, but that film and Beckham were enough to get her auditions that ended up with starring roles in a TV version of Doctor Zhivago and as Elizabeth Swann in the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie.
However while she’s okay in the Bend It Like Beckham, she’s not great, and is completely outclassed by Parminder Nagra. It’s also true that with her slender frame and the fact she’s all cheekbones, she doesn’t really make the most believable female footballer.
I’ve never quite understood why everyone decided she was so great and made her a star. Looks-wise she is an amazingly attractive woman, but most of her performances are, well, wooden. She just sort of stands there, being pouty and saying lines in a slightly flat, low-key way, and while it’s sort of okay, it’s not great. She doesn’t make it easy to believe or get invested in what she’s talking about.
However the thing I really don’t get is why anyone looked at Knightley and thought, ‘You know what? She should be in action films!’
Keira looks like she might snap if anyone hit her too hard, and yet she not only got a starring role in Pirates Of The Caribbean, but quickly followed it by playing a Celtic warrior woman in King Arthur. It must be one of the least believable images in modern cinema seeing the slender Knightley stalking onto the screen in full war paint, with a bow and arrow, ready to go to war with the Romans. They did indeed have warrior women back then, but I’d be willing to bet that they didn’t look like they’d just stepped off a Parisian catwalk and hadn’t eaten for a month.
Not content with being unbelievable in the third Century AD, Knightley then starred in Domino, where she made the least convincing bounty hunter in history. I’ve watched Dog the Bounty Hunter, and the fact is 90% of the people he catches could flatten Keira just by looking at her, so God know why director Tony Scott thought people would look at her and think she could hunt down dangerous criminals.
However people in Hollywood must have thought all this Keira action was a good idea, because in the Pirates sequels she got an expanded role, where she was expected to engage in even more swashbuckling. More than that, in the films we are supposed to believe she has enough authority to convince the bad ass pirate council that she’d make the best ruler of their strange grouping. Huh? But when they were writing the script, did no one look at Keira and just think, ‘Nah, that’s just too silly. The man with a tentacle face is believable enough, but Keira Knightley as a pirate queen? No, it’d never happen’.
It didn’t help either that she gave the same performance as she does in most of her films, where she pouts and says thing in an oddly flat way, which would be unlikely to convince you to buy a Mars Bar, let alone that she’s an all action pirate who can lead the privateers to victory.
It might sound like I’m just being mean, and to a certain extent I am, but I really, really don’t understand why she got cast in so many action roles. Of all the actresses in the world who might be believable in those parts, they cast the one person who could barely make a convincing footballer, let alone a bounty hunter or a pirate.
In her defence, she’s not too bad in period dramas. While I still don’t think she’s a great actress, her style and delivery fits a lot better in the likes of Atonement and The Duchess. She certainly has the look, and these films are also the one place (so far) where her acting actually works, as she does have a knack for playing woman trapped by circumstances that are beyond their control.
I’m sure a lot of people would suggest that I don’t need to look further than the fact that she’s a very beautiful woman to see why she’s become such a big star. But surely there must be more to it than that though? There are a lot of very striking actresses, many of whom can give a more convincing performance than we’ve seen from Keira, yet they don’t make the a-list.
No, she remains an enigma to me. My best theory is that she presents a fantasy of a woman who acts tough, but is still incredibly feminine. However while you can sort of understand the fantasy, when you actually see her on screen, it’s not very convincing.
Maybe I’m completely wrong and Keira Knightley is a great actress, but it's just that for some reason I can’t appreciate her magnificent thespian skills. I’m sorry, I just find her rather wooden and I can’t quite understand how she became such a big star, or why people keep trying to convince us that someone with such a sylph-like frame and low-key delivery, is some sort of all-action warrior.
All suggestions as to what I’m missing would be warmly received, or maybe it is just that the right look can get you to the top, whether you’re actually good at acting the parts you’re cast in or not. I have a horrible suspicion that this may be closer to the truth than I’d like to believe.
TIM ISAAC
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