The Invisible Woman -- Movie Review

The Invisible Woman

Directed by Ralph Fiennes

This movie is slow moving and hard to follow.  If you don't know much about Charles Dickens -- and most Americans don't, let's be real -- it is very hard, especially at the outset (that is, for about the first forty-five minutes) to tell what is going on, who the characters are, or what their relationships are to one another.  It takes a long time to wind up the propeller on this airplane and get it off the ground.  The plot is very simple:  an unhappily married man in midlife meets a fresh young woman and has an affair with her.  The affair goes badly, however, and they end up separating.  That is about all that happens.  So in a story like that the interest is going to be in the psychological intricacies of the characters and their relationships to one another.  But this film does not succeed in that aspect.  It is called "The Invisible Woman."  Presumably, that refers to Nellie (Felicity Jones), but it could more aptly refer to Charles Dickens' wife, Mary, (Susanna Hislop), who is given short shrift in the movie, and presumably also in life.  More broadly, everyone in this movie is invisible, including Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes).  None of the characters are well drawn.  We do see Charles Dickens' vitality, energy, and his love of celebrity and the acclaim he received for being a famous writer.  But we see nothing of what made him tick as a writer, why he wrote the things that he wrote, what inspired him, or the dynamics of his relationships with his women.  Nellie is an aloof, self-absorbed young woman, who seems oddly conservative for a man like Charles Dickens.  They seem to break up -- sort of -- after a train wreck in which Nellie is injured.  She goes on and establishes a life for herself after Dickens, but none of it has any rhyme or reason.  A lot of time and attention and expense has been spent on costumes, settings and creating the cinematic spectacle.  The result, I feel, is rather overstaged.  This striving for cinematic perfection gives the film an unreal, illusory quality.  Perhaps it mirrors the way the characters and the affair have been portrayed.  The whole thing comes off as sanitized and romanticized, which the nineteenth century definitely wasn't, nor was anything in Charles Dickens' books.  I don't believe anything in this movie, and it did not make me want to read the book.  It is the kind of movie where the more I think about it, the worse it gets.   I guess that is an indication that I should stop now, but you get the idea.