Three stars. Rating: R, and quite ludicrously, for mild sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.17.14
Consider the irony:
Actor/director Ralph Fiennes’ new film about Charles Dickens, a storytelling
craftsman, is undone by a maddeningly clumsy script.
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| During a late-night social gathering, Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) entertains the guests by hypnotizing Frances Ternan (Kristin Scott Thomas, far left), much to the delight of her daughers, from left, Nelly (Felicity Jones) and Maria (Perdita Weeks). Nelly, however, is far more captivated by Dickens himself, than by his little party trick. |
However authentic the 19th
century setting, however lavish the costumes, however fascinating that so many
of the English estates and countryside settings seem not to have changed, it
remains impossible to become involved with this narrative. Abi Morgan’s
screenplay is slow, difficult to follow, and needlessly enigmatic. Essential
details are glossed over or rendered so subtly as to be overlooked.
Morgan already has demonstrated
an unconventional approach to biographical material; her screenplay for The Iron Lady was less about Margaret Thatcher, and more about the nature of
grief, and the cruelty of old age. Viewers wanting to learn something about the
career that shaped and defined Thatcher walked away disappointed; folks are
likely to do the same after enduring Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman.
The title refers to Ellen (Nelly)
Ternan, who in 1857, at the age of 18, came to the attention of Dickens during
a Manchester performance of The Frozen Deep, a play that he had co-written
with his good friend Wilkie Collins. Nelly and her two older sisters, Maria and
Fanny, were at that time following in the acting footsteps of their mother,
Frances Ternan, who had achieved modest fame on the London stage.
Dickens, then 45, was married and
the father of nine children. He nonetheless fell in love with Nelly, an
arrangement that her mother likely “tolerated” both because of the celebrated
author’s stature, and because her youngest daughter had scant acting talent.
Besides which, Victorian-era actresses generally were regarded as only one
short step above prostitutes ... so it could be argued that Nelly didn’t have
much of a reputation to protect.
But Dickens did. Despite the very
public manner in which he disavowed his wife and mother of their many children
— publishing a letter in his own magazine, Household Words, which blamed her
for their estrangement — he nonetheless managed to keep his relationship with
Nelly below public (and press) radar.
Dickens and Nelly remained lovers
and companions until the author’s death in 1870, at which point — and here’s
the fascinating part — the 31-year-old Nelly, still looking quite youthful,
“re-invented” herself as a much younger woman. While staying with her sister
Maria in Oxford, she caught the eye of an undergraduate named George Wharton.
They eventually married — he was 24, she a clandestine 36 — and settled in
Margate, where they had two children and ran a boys’ school.
When anybody asked about her
unusually extensive library of Dickens’ works, she’d claim that the author had
been a family friend when she was a little girl.
(One assumes that Nelly
eventually confessed at least part of the truth to her husband, when her
advancing age became more obvious, and at a point when their relationship could
have withstood the revelation.)
