Muddying of Miss Elizabeth

Jane Austen is an acquired taste. But if you like her enclosed world, by no means as cosy as some of her detractors claim, you will appreciate Joe Wright's version of her most popular novel.

For starters, it has an excellent Elizabeth in Keira Knightley, who finally proves she can act with subtlety as well as freshness, even if she is far from the plainest of the Bennet sisters.

The film also contains a shrewd and almost certainly accurate take on the constipated caste system of the time, just beginning to be threatened from across the Channel by the French Revolution.

The visuals, too, though determined to achieve a grubbier, more realistic look, will satisfy those who like their period pieces sumptuous, as there are plenty of grand houses on display.

There are drawbacks. A very able cast is sometimes forced into something-near caricature, as they have been coloured a little too highly by Deborah Moggach's screenplay and the director.

Matthew Macfadyen's Darcy, for instance, is too obviously a boorish snob at first and Brenda Blethyn's admittedly very amusing Mrs Bennet seems to flutter straight out of a Mike Leigh comedy.

We don't need Austen's punches so telegraphed, especially with actors of this calibre on hand. To their credit, they surmount the problem.

Darcy's realisation that he has met his match in Elizabeth, and loves her for it, is beautifully done, while Judi Dench gives us a wonderfully nasty turn as that old bitch Lady Catherine and Tom Hollander is splendidly boring as Mr Collins, whose sermons induce near-narcolepsy.

This is, of course, primarily a love story as Mr and Mrs Bennet's five daughters, holed up in rusticity, try in various degrees of desperation to find themselves marriageable men and thus financial security.

Elizabeth is the exception, an independently minded woman who won't accept the constraints of the time, and in the end hooks the best match of all.