The Invisible Woman ** (2013, Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Kristin Scott Thomas) – Movie Review

Hard Times with Dickens.

Ralph Fiennes directs himself as Charles Dickens, who at the height of his career meets and falls for a younger woman, Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan (Felicity Jones), who becomes his secret mistress up to his death.

Dickens is a gift of a role for any actor, but Fiennes isn’t at his fiennest here. Somehow the chilly old boy’s smugness and conviction defeat him. He may be playing Dickens as a cheating husband, but he clearly wants to bring out the passionate romantic nature of the love affair and make it seem more significant than being faithful to his loyal wife.

It’s puzzling why the often brilliant Fiennes can’t fire up as Dickens. Maybe the problem is that Fiennes shouldn’t have directed the movie as well as star in it. On stage, Simon Callow was a marvellous Dickens, honking and hooting away but quite subtly too. Here on film, Fiennes doesn’t suggest why we should be interested in a dead author and his tawdry romance with  a younger woman. Just because it happened, and happened in the life of someone famous, doesn’t automatically make it interesting.

I get it. It’s somebody talented, rich and famous. He has a dull, tubby wife. He chases after someone young, thin and lovely. Not much of a story. Certainly not much in the surprise department.

The best acting in the movie comes from Joanna Scanlan as Dickens’s plain, plump, homely, cheated-on wife Catherine (Kate), but her splendid performance has the disadvantage of pointing out the modesty of some of the work around her. The scene where she confronts Nelly is a magnificent piece of cinema and is worth the whole of the rest of the film. It crackles with suppressed emotion as the actress expresses everything in muted Victorian rage and frustration. If it was a film noir, she’d have a gun and kill the mistress. As it is, she kills her with a look.

Abi Morgan’s screenplay from Claire Tomalin’s book lacks clarity, fire and excitement. A large cast of the usual suspects does their best, but they don’t have enough good stuff to get to grips with. And there is no sense ensemble performances by the actors, they’re just doing their own thing whatever. Tom Hollander as author Wilkie Collins seemed to be acting in a different style from other players. Kristin Scott Thomas starts promisingly as Nelly’s mother Mrs Frances Ternan but the role just meanders and peters out. This is true of the film too.

On the plus side, it’s carefully made and the Victorian atmosphere and artefacts are attractively conjured up, in the typical fashion of a BBC Film. But it’s hard to learn much from The Invisible Woman or get emotionally involved in it. It’s all a bit stuffy, like taking a movie camera around exhibits in a Victorian museum.

Jones says it was weird and very Freudian to go from playing father and daughter in Cemetery Junction(2010) to playing lovers in this movie. But Fiennes says: ‘It’s just a job.’

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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