Telluride ’13: The Invisible Woman

Invisiblewoman

***/****
directed by Ralph Fiennes

by Walter Chaw It opens with an
almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the
prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the
proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the
literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that
often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of
the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress
Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), it has about it a delicious gravity, a weight of
inevitability driven by long shots of Nelly pounding across a beach as waves
crash behind, the crunch of her footfalls foretelling a coming storm. With his
second feature, Fiennes establishes himself as midway between the
traditionalism of Merchant/Ivory and the carnality of Kenneth Branagh–the
marriage of the two styles in bright relief during a climactic train-crash
sequence that, initially muted, pulls out into something wilder. Though it
arguably breaks no new ground save successfully portraying Dickens as the
asshat he was, credit is due for a very fine, studiously-detailed performance
from Jones that allows Nelly to avoid the clichés attendant to the young
mistress role. Hers is a completely rounded, imminently human journey through
childhood to self-actualization, joining the growing list of strong roles for
women this year despite the film seeming doomed to be shunted to the side. It
deserves more than that. If short of great, The Invisible Woman is
strong enough (note all the rumblings on the soundtrack, the lines warning of
storms rhyming with minor apocalypses in the picture proper) to establish
Fiennes as perhaps the same kind of director as he is an actor: alive somewhere
between the meat and the mind.

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