Ralph Fiennes (2013)
The first half is excellent, thanks to the freedom of the camera movement and the fluid naturalism of the acting, which is well orchestrated by Ralph Fiennes. His own playing of Charles Dickens is a particular highlight, as are the descriptions of Victorian theatre. For as long as the developing relationship between Dickens and the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan is conveyed in hints and moments – a look between them that’s held a fraction too long, Dickens’s wife’s expressions of unease – the tension is absorbing. But two things combine to make The Invisible Woman increasingly hard work. The first is purely visual – the natural light interiors (and much of the action takes place indoors) become punitive. The reliance on natural light made dramatic sense in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011) – the dark spaces of Thornfield expressed the house’s secrets – but it’s just an eye strain here. It’s frustrating too because the DoP Rob Hardy’s composition and colouring of the outdoor sequences often have the quality of period paintings come to life – Doncaster races, a London hill where Dickens and his young mistress bump into his son Charley (who is older than Nelly), the beach at Margate. A greater problem is the shape of Abi Morgan’s script, based on Claire Tomalin’s 1991 biography of Ellen Ternan. We know from the start of the film that Nelly, now a headmaster’s wife and a mother, lives in Margate and her seemingly daily routine there is too striking not to be noticed: Nelly paces along the shore in such agitation that she must be as locally conspicuous as the French lieutenant’s woman was on the Cobb at Lyme Regis. There’s no real traction between the present (the 1880s) and the flashbacks to Nelly’s life with Dickens (in the late 1850s and early 1860s), which form the major part of the story. And Nelly’s unhappiness is eventually resolved in a too easy and mechanical way. She tells a local clergyman about her past, although he’d already worked out who she once was, and, in so doing, gets it out of her system.
At the start, we watch Nelly and this clergyman, the Reverend Benham, rehearsing a group of schoolboys (at Nelly’s husband’s school) in a play – No Thoroughfare, co-written by Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins. (The acting in the school play is at just the right level.) Benham is a Dickens enthusiast; it’s a conversation with him that triggers Nelly’s memories. The first flashback features another Dickens-Collins collaboration: the former is directing, and appearing in, the latter’s play The Frozen Deep in Manchester. The Ternans, mother and three daughters, are touring actresses, also appearing in the production. Nelly is the youngest and regarded as a minor talent within the family but she soon catches the director’s attention. Dickens chooses her to speak the play’s epilogue over the dead body of the character he’s playing. The juxtaposition of the two plays, and especially the deferral of Nelly’s delivery of the epilogue until the very end of the film are obvious but effective enough; and Fiennes’s dramatisation of Dickens as the centre of attention, on and off stage, is very well done. You see not only how exhausting this is for his wife Catherine but also how Dickens needs to perform to keep more troubling thoughts and feelings at bay.
In his playing of Dickens, Fiennes shows more vitality and greater emotional precision than I’ve seen from him since the 1990s roles that launched his film acting career. Without any harsh words between them, he and Joanna Scanlan, in a fine performance as Catherine, describe a marriage that’s died inside: the couple are miles away from each other. Catherine’s physical heaviness is important – it expresses how his wife has become an implacable problem for Dickens: a dead weight. For her part, she seems self-conscious about her plumpness (there’s a confounding moment when he interrupts her getting ready for bed and she’s unclothed: he apologises for his mistake) – yet there’s a slight suggestion too that Catherine Dickens understands that her bulk is a reminder to her husband that she’s there. When Dickens’s affair with Nelly has become the subject of public rumour and he writes to The Times denying it, Charley (well played by Michael Marcus) reads the letter out to his mother, and she breaks down. Joanna Scanlan is very moving in this moment, which also gets across a good sense of Catherine’s being the heart of the family. One of the younger children, playing in an adjoining room, listens curiously to her sobs. Compared with his wife, Dickens, for all his taking the lead in boisterous games with the children when he’s at home, is a celebrity who belongs to others.
Kristin Scott Thomas has threatened in a recent interview to give up film acting because it’s too boring: if she really is bored, it’s beginning to show on screen. She has very little characterisation as Mrs Ternan and is too languid for a hard-working theatrical mother: you can’t believe she ever had the energy for either histrionics or childbirth. I’m not sure why Ralph Fiennes cast her unless for old times’ (English Patient) sake. Both the older Ternan daughters (Perdita Weeks and Amanda Hale) seem right, though, and Tom Hollander is convincingly eccentric as Wilkie Collins. In the Margate part of the story, John Kavanagh is properly shrewd and watchful as Benham and Tom Burke plays the difficult part of Nelly’s husband, George, intelligently – although some of the difficulty of the role exposes the weakness of Abi Morgan’s script. There’s a suggestion late on that George, as well as Benham, may be aware of his wife’s past – but it’s not at all clear when he cottoned on or, if he did, why he said nothing. If he’s just learned the truth, how has he absorbed it so easily? There’s a similar lack of clarity in the earlier part of the story, with little indication of what Nelly’s family thought of her going off to France with Dickens (to have a baby, which is stillborn) or if this caused a rift with them.
The Staplehurst train crash in 1865 is very well staged and upsetting in its traumatic effect on Nelly. The accident is terrifying in itself but Dickens’s behaviour in the immediate aftermath shows his young mistress that he means to keep her a secret, whatever the circumstances. Felicity Jones’s looking much younger than her thirty years works for her in this part. She’s believable as the teenage Nelly; the fact that she retains an immature, though careworn, look in early middle age is an effective way of implying that Nelly hasn’t got beyond her youthful relationship with Dickens. This is the second film running in which Jones’s character flirts with an older man but the interactions between her and Ralph Fiennes are more persuasive than those between Jones and Guy Pearce in Breathe In: Fiennes is very good at registering Dickens’s shock at the extent to which he reciprocates. The bits between them that don’t work so well are, unfortunately, the illustrations of the supposed climax of the relationship and the film’s rather forced linking of this to the plot of Great Expectations.
10 February 2014
