THE INVISIBLE WOMAN
Starring Felicity Jones, Ralph Fiennes
Directed by Ralph Fiennes
Ralph Fiennes caught practically everyone off-guard with his 2011 directorial debut. Quite the feat when you consider that it was an adaptation of a 400-year-old play. However, his Bard-by-way-of-Kathryn-Bigelow take on Shakespeares Coriolanus was bold and bloody, transferring the doomed odyssey of a contemptuous general to modern Belgrade and infusing the story with a frenetic energy.
Conversely, his overly restrained follow-up concerns the secret love affair between Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and young actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones). Amidst immaculate art direction, desires are repressed, decorum is maintained, dialogue is delivered in earnest whispers and everyone suffers nobly. While touching on Dickens public life as a celebrity and loveless marriage, Abi Morgans script largely focuses on the lot of Nelly, detailing the sacrifices such a relationship imposde on an ambitious young woman of modest means. Ultimately this does little to enliven the staid proceedings.
Given that the exact details concerning Dickens and Ternans relationship are mostly unverified (much of their correspondence was destroyed), one wishes that Fiennes had taken greater dramatic licence in his depiction of it. Jones is a considerable talent but shes constrained by a flashback-heavy biopic structure that proves as oppressive as the 19th century social mores. Too often, Nellys story seems to have been exhumed rather than brought to life.
At one point, Dickens wife dismisses his work as fiction(s) designed to entertain. That certainly sounds preferable to a muted film determined to be admired. Curtis Woloschuk
