The Invisible Woman (M)
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Sunday August 31 at 4.10pm at Lilac City Cinema
THE Invisible Woman marks Ralph Fiennes’ second outing as director, while also starring as the complex figure, novelist Charles Dickens.
Fiennes’ vibrant and mercurial performance captures Dickens’ radiating vigour, his passion for theatre and his forlorn family life.
It is also exposes a very human and fallible figure. A victim of his popularity and ego.
The movie’s other principal character is the 18 year-old Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones) - a young aspiring actress - who Dickens becomes besotted with.
She soon becomes his casting favourite. Nelly is competent, smart and adventurous but not very gifted on the stage.
In 1857, at the height of Dickens’ career when he was 45 years-of-age, he pursued a love affair with Nelly. For quite a while their relationship was chaste and developed almost without the innocent Nelly even noticing.
She remained his muse and mistress for the rest of his life, but their relationship was kept secret, even after Dickens’ separation from his wife.
Through much of this time Nelly was looked over by her protective and increasingly concerned mother, played with beautiful restraint by Kristin Scott Thomas.
Presciently she says to Dickens “My daughters are fine young women, but I sometimes worry about their future”.
Dickens’ wife is Catherine (Joanna Scanlan), who after bearing 10 children, is too exhausted to engage in any form of protest at her husband’s dalliance. The inevitable transpires and they divorce in 1858.
Scanlan is superb in her role delivering a desperately sad performance of grief and perceptiveness to her lamentations regarding her husband’s infidelity. She is someone Dickens has fallen out of love with.
Eventually Dickens and Ternan lived together and their relationship was an open secret among ‘polite’ society. The complexities of Victorian morality fully played out.
To really understand Nelly you are forced to study her non-verbal gestures; to read her eyes, glances and looks because Jones’ Nelly keeps her innermost thoughts to herself.
Contrast this with the vivacity and unbridled warmth of Fiennes’ Dickens - a character not possible but to like.
Dickens is one of the world’s greatest English authors. Who could not marvel at his expertise in creating intimately detailed eccentric, loveable and bizarre characters such as Pip, Wackford Squeers, Amy Dorrit and Ebenezer Scrooge.
As well, his incisive, withering portrayal of a social order so pervasively false and dehumanised - especially in Bleak House - is masterful.
And yet, this movie is robust enough to tackle the irony of a brilliantly compassionate novelist consciously ignoring the turmoil and angst his own life caused.
Here we see Dickens with feet of clay: deceiving his wife and acts of selfishness.
The Invisible Woman is only partly a story of the romance between Dickens and Ternan. It’s totality is the quiet tragedy of Nelly’s life that confers to the movie its gravitas.
Ternan’s story is one of someone who almost wasn’t there; her story very nearly disappearing from the record for good.
However, The Invisible Woman, based on Claire Tomalin’s pioneering biography of Dickens and adapted by British screenwriter Abi Morgan, brings to life the clandestine love affair between a vivacious middle-aged Dickens and the much-younger Ternan.
The private and secretive relationship between Dickens and Ternan - they destroyed all correspondence that would have given an insight into their affair- has over time become one of the great love stories in literary history.
A relationship that is considered to have been the inspiration for characters such as Lucie Manette from A Tale of Two Cities and Estella in Great Expectations.
The Invisible Woman is an elegant recreation of the times, dealing with raw and primal emotions.
It intimately portarys a different era with its moral codes and incongruities as well as the brilliance of Dickens as a novelist and a notoriety in his times.
The superb performances from Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Joanna Scanlan and Kristin Scott Thomas, deliver a richly powerful drama chronicling a passionate relationship often conducted in secret.