Review: ‘The Invisible Woman’

Fiennes takes on double-duty, directing himself as Charles Dickens in this film that chronicles a love affair that lasted the last twelve years of the writer’s life.

The woman on whom he lavishes his affections is much younger than the middle-aged Dickens, an actress called Nelly. The film is told in a series of flashbacks from Nelly’s perspective, who is now older and married to a man who knows little of her past.

She recalls when she and Dickens first met: at a performance of a Wilkie Collins play in which Dickens played a lead role, with Nelly and her theatrical family playing smaller parts. She’s just eighteen at this time and Dickens is married with ten children who all adore him.

To begin with the friendship between them is tentative and carried out in public, as was only proper at the time. Gradually though, Nelly becomes the writer’s muse and she finds it harder and harder to resist him.

As played by Fiennes, Dickens oozes charm, humour and charisma. It’s no surprise the reserved and naïve Nelly comes under his spell. Jones manages to perfectly capture the confusion Nelly feels as she’s swept up by this larger-than-life personality…and out of the safe, quiet life she expected.

Some of the film’s most poignant moments are the ones where Dickens is forced to deal with the wife he spurns for Nelly.  Catherine is no intellectual match for Dickens, but she knows her husband and warns Nelly that she will always be sharing him with his adoring public.

The costumes and scenery in this film are breathtaking, but no amount of eye-candy can distract from the fact there is little chemistry between Fiennes and Jones. Their affair is not shown as passionate because the attraction is more intellectual than physical, but this just makes it feel cold.

I wanted to care more about Nelly, but she seemed mopey and unwilling to move on from an affair that must have sucked the life from her bones, while offering little pleasure in return.

Pretty, well acted and probably more historically accurate than we want to believe, The Invisible Woman is a solid film…just not an exciting one.

6/10

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