I enjoyed the first film Ralph Fiennes directed, Coriolanus (read my review here). It wasn’t particularly impressive, but it was a solid first effort that was right up Fiennes’ Shakespearean alley. Frankly, I feel the same way about The Invisible Woman. It’s another good film, but I think Fiennes is still trying to find his voice as a director.
The Invisible Women opens in 1883, with Nelly (Felicity Jones), a schoolteacher prone to long, thoughtful walks, is late to rehearsal for her schoolchildren who are acting in a play written by Charles Dickens, a beloved English author. Nelly has a fascination with Dickens, one that her husband George (Tom Burke) doesn’t understand but their mutual friend, Reverend Benham (John Kavanagh) is curious about. The film then flashes back to many years before, when Dickens (Fiennes) casts 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan in one of his plays, and before long is smitten with her. Ellen is infatuated with his work and Ellen’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) believes the match would be good for Ellen because she isn’t a very good actress. While Dickens is nearly thirty years older than her, he is the most popular man in the country, worshiped for and rich because of his writing. However, Dickens is a married man with ten children to the homely Catherine (Joanna Scanlan). Nevertheless, Ellen soon becomes Dickens’ mistress, a role she begins to despise, especially once she realizes that she will always need to remain Dickens’ secret, even after public rumors about their relationship cause Dickens to insensitively announce his separation from his wife via letter to the newspaper. The film follows Ellen’s conflicted feelings during her relationship with Dickens, which increasingly makes her a “kept” woman. The past is intercut with scenes of the older Ellen — now obviously Nelly — coming to terms with her relationship with the now long-dead Dickens.
While based on historical fact (Ellen Ternan was indeed Dickens’ mistress), so much of their relationship was conducted in secret that much of the book that Abi Morgan‘s script and Fiennes’ film is based on is made up what few records of Ellen exist, including what can only be considered second or third-hand information. That isn’t necessarily a problem — biopics have been made on far shakier information before — but once the affair is established and Ellen more-or-less comes to terms with her feelings for Dickens and being kept a secret, the film really doesn’t really have much story left to tell.
Fiennes’ portrayal of Dickens is wonderful and full of the eccentric energy one would expect Dickens to have. He is the type of man who owns any room he walks into. Because Jones is more or less “there” the other really compelling character is Catherine Dickins, whose face is perpetually full of jealous neglect. In the film (and in real life), one of the reasons why Dickens says he left his wife for Ellen is because he found Ellen intellectually superior. However, there is little demonstration of this in the film, and Jones’ Ellen remains coquettish through the early scenes of their relationship, then gloomy in the latter. There is no deep discussions, intellectual or otherwise, between them besides when Ellen complains at length about their arrangement. Other elements of the film are also wonderful — the period costumes and sets are excellent, especially in one scene when Dickens takes a late night walk among the very urban poor that he wrote bestselling novels about. But there isn’t much of a story here after the first hour.
Perhaps the film might play better with an English audience because they’re more culturally connected to Dickens, but I’m a fan of Dickens’ work and have read several of his novels and I wasn’t really engaged with the story. In fact, I was surprised Fiennes didn’t delve into the more sordid details of Dickens’ public and private attacks on his wife, and I was disappointed that Scanlan is written out of the movie early on (yes, Dickens did publicly announce their separation in real life, but that doesn’t mean her story ends there). Scanlan’s stoneface portrayal of Catherine’s pain is captivating, and she really deserves more scenes in the film. There’s also a theme here about how an adoring public can launch one’s ego out of control and yet also be a curse because one no longer has any privacy, but like the other narrative threads this fades in the second hour.
It’s a major problem when the second half of a movie is far less compelling than the first half, so while The Invisible Woman might have been the right material for a book it really isn’t right for a film, at least not in this form. In that sense, I find it hard to “blame” it on Fiennes as a director — he’s simply a wonderful actor and a still-developing director in search of a story to make a film about.
Rating: A usual great performance from Fiennes and a surprising performance from Scanlan unfortunately can’t save a film that’s short on story (5.5/10).
Recent Comments