![]() ![]() In one harrowing scene, a train carrying the couple - with Dickens traveling under an assumed name - derails, threatening to expose their affair. But they are seen together so often that gossip about them spreads even before their relationship is consummated. The screenplay by Abi Morgan (“Shame,” “The Iron Lady”) gently depicts the conflict between Dickens’s appetite for the spotlight and his passion and concern for Nelly, whom he tries to protect by burning his letters. Fiennes, best known to millions as Harry Potter’s nemesis Lord Voldemort, gives his warmest, most full-bodied screen performance as Dickens, an irresistibly charismatic, tirelessly energetic celebrity who was the life of every party he attended. You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of “The Invisible Woman” and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film. Her beauty recalls the young Susannah York in “Loss of Innocence,” a.k.a. Observing her is like watching a plant whose buds slowly bloom over time. Jones gives a performance of extraordinary subtlety and delicacy. It isn’t until the very end that you see Nelly in all her fullness, a radiantly vital woman happily settled. In depicting Nelly, “The Invisible Woman” slowly fills in the outlines of its reticent title character. Kristin Scott Thomas, in one of her least glamorous roles, plays Nelly’s caring widowed mother who, realizing that Nelly’s limited acting talent is a hindrance to a theatrical career, tacitly encourages the relationship as long as it is kept secret. One rebel who appears in “The Invisible Woman” is Collins’s defiantly free-spirited mistress Caroline Graves (Michelle Fairley), whom Dickens takes Nelly to meet. Virtuous women may have been put on pedestals, but woe to the woman who flouted the rules unless she was prepared to live outside society. “The Invisible Woman” reminds you uncomfortably of the degree to which Victorian society was a man’s world. Despite the rowdy bonhomie that accompanied Dickens wherever he went, currents of fear and suspicion lurked behind the scenes. Unlike the typical British period piece descended from the Merchant-Ivory school of Anglophile nostalgia, it purposefully conveys a 19th-century sense of time, which in the movie seems to pass much more slowly than it does today.Įvery personal decision and social gesture is consequential in Victorian society, in which the rules of propriety are strictly observed and a perceived indiscretion can destroy a woman’s reputation. Fiennes, takes its time filling in the blanks. In 1876, six years after Dickens’s death, Nelly married Robinson, who was 12 years younger, and began a new life out from under the shadows of her secret liaison. They met in 1857 when Nelly, 18, was appearing in the Collins play “The Frozen Deep,” whose production Dickens oversaw. As the film’s production notes put it, “For Nelly, the rehearsals are igniting memories of a lost life, one that is still haunting her.”ĭespite what this mysterious opening scene might suggest, “The Invisible Woman,” adapted from Claire Tomalin’s 1990 biography, is not “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” redux, but the true story of Dickens’s longtime clandestine affair with Nelly Ternan, who was 27 years his junior. ![]() We soon learn that the distraught woman, Nelly ( Felicity Jones), is married to the school’s headmaster, George Wharton Robinson (Tom Burke). In a nearby school, a group of boys, rehearsing a play by Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander) and his friend Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes), awaits her return. A brooding, enigmatic beauty strides across a beach in Margate, England, during the opening moments of “The Invisible Woman.” The year is 1885. ![]()
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