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Rated 2.98 stars
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ReelTalk Movie Reviews
Secret Love within the Heart of Me
by Donald Levit

The Invisible Woman is not H.G. Wells gender-balanced. Nor, ostensibly about Charles Dickens with appropriate opening on Christmas Day and geared in the direction of Great Expectations, is it a modern NYC-with-sex desecration of that novel. Rather, it is Abi Morgan’s script adaptation of English literary biographer-historian Claire Tomalin’s prize-winning treatment of Ellen “Nelly” Ternan (played by Felicity Jones).

As a knowing literate film, it will probably prove box-office anathema but rewarding for those looking beyond forgettable entertainment. It offers a fine cast in period costume and setting, a quiet subtle score, and careful Victorian cultural references though not the broader lit-crit jokes of, say, colorful Shakespeare in Love.

Sharing press/media Q&A stage with Joanna Scanlan for the 2013 New York Film Festival U.S. première in a Gala Tribute to him, director-actor Ralph Fiennes indicated that he had been attracted by the concept of a person’s long carrying within him/herself a secret that needs release for life to go on. Despite his Will in SiL and American assumptions that Brits at least read, Fiennes admitted that he had only recently delved into Dickens and had to be convinced by others to act the part of the Victorian writer.

More than friend and writing and acting collaborator Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander), his Dickens is non-stop on-stage even when not literally on a platform. Lecturer, reader, actor, activist, personality, the English world’s most loved writer is at the apogee of fame and adulation, and, as Scanlan noted, he loves it more than anything else. However, performing every minute also has its price -- the demanding schedule contributed to his death at fifty-eight -- and takes an emotional toll, for behind the façade the man is lonely and isolated. Hounded by fans and press -- Fiennes denied the film is meant as a comment on the latter -- he cannot unwind.

That is, until he falls for Nelly, living a happy if financially uncertain life with her family of touring actresses, mother and sisters Maria and Fanny (Kristin Scott Thomas, Perdita Weeks, Amanda Hale). The modest eighteen-year-old had been in tears at having “to show so much leg” in a Talfourd play. With her, he is able to bare the secret misery of his life. Catherine (Scanlan), his wife and mother of his ten children, is a dour -- little humor in the film, anyway -- but pitiable woman unable to keep up with the tirelessness of the husband whose love for her long ago dried up.

Not sweetness and light, Dickens in Love is a willful boy who has not grown up, brilliant in his creations on the page but obtuse about the workings of flesh-and-blood right next to him. Not expecting it to have any effect, suffering Catherine cautions the proper but star-struck young woman about the cleavage between the man’s image and the reality of him.

That past occupies much of the story but framed by the Margate present. Fifteen years after the author’s death, in all but official widow’s-weeds black, Mrs. Nelly Wharton Robinson (Jones) takes power walks on the tidal sands, noticed by Dickens fan the Reverend William Benham (a historical person, by John Kavanagh). At her headmaster husband’s (Tom Burke, as George) school, she is rehearsing the boys -- including son Geoffrey, got up like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion -- for a performance of a Dickens-Collins theatrical piece.

Benson unobtrusively offers his clerical self as a sounding board, but it takes most of the hundred-eleven minutes for her to gather resolve to walk to his hilltop church and graveyard. Bound, or imprisoned, by hypocrisy and morality of an age (and paradoxically of Dickens), saddened by a tragic event, silently bowing to image and public invisibility, she cannot embrace life, wife- and motherhood until she opens that past and frees her heart.

In response to a question, Fiennes said that, yes, he was fond of shots of the backs of people’s heads and bodies, which made “you want to know what’s around the corner.” A “mystery” in not the usual sense, The Invisible Woman makes you want to know the facts, her acceptance of which leads to “I am here” rather than to Dickens’ correctly considered initial separation for ever of fictional Pip and Estella.

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics; not rated by MPAA.)


                                                                                                                                                                               
 
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