Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Felicity Jones, Ralph Fiennes, Kristen Scott Thomas, Perdita Weeks, Joanna Scanlan, Tom Hollander, Amanda Hale, John Kavanagh, Tom Burke, Susanna Hislop, Tommy Curson-Smith, David Collings, Michael Marcus, Richard McCabe, Gabriel Vick, Mark Dexter, Joseph Paxton, Charlotte Hope, Philippe Smolikowski.
How sincere is the light we shine on other’s flaws when we cannot acknowledge our own? The politician and the layman might preach and be found wanting and shunned from office, but the artist, how much do expect from them when it is their creativity and observation that can make them prone to fall in m oral outrage, and yet rise without sanction, without misgivings from the public as they continue to demand more from their insightful hero.
Perhaps it is that the artist understands the quagmire of possible hypocrisy in their work, they may tug at the conscious of society, but they refuse to bring down fire and brimstone as those in courtly wigs, suitable ties and cassocks flaring from the pulpit; one may shine a light on a shadow and still be safe in the darkness but unearth insincerity and you will be buried alive the next day.
Despite all that has been levelled against him, the certainly objectionable way that Charles Dickens shunned and treated his wife in the last years of their lives, the way he took on an affair with a much younger woman, the fact that in spite of this he was, in terms of literature and social commentary, one of the finest British writers to have ever lived, leads to a possible conclusion that with thanks to the women he kept hidden, able to ride through a storm that in his day would have seen a man of the cloth defrocked, a politician hounded from office.
However, like most men of the age, it is not the scandal of the affair, but the scandalous treatment of An Invisible Woman to which Ralph Fiennes, in his position as director and in the role of the 19th Century literary giant, aptly shows as the question is openly asked of the viewer, who was the veiled woman, the wife he locked away, played superbly by Joanne Scanlan, or the young aspiring actress Nelly (Ellen) Ternan to whom he would not acknowledge in public.
There is no doubting the immense flaw in the man, but once again it arguably comes down to artistic whim and soul, for example how can you write so passionately on the monstrous if you have never lived it, conversely how do you stay hidden from the world if you do not agree with the artist using you as the muse, the conduit, to another world caught on paper, dipped in ink, for all time.
An Invisible Woman is more than a two-way mirror of the effect of love, lust and arguable ownership, of a man’s desires between his past and the future, represented superbly by Felicity Jones in the role of Nelly Ternan; it is reflection of how we hold the artist to a lower position of ideal than we do perhaps almost anyone else. This is neither a good or bad state of affairs, but observation, an understanding caught on camera and dominated by the sheer guilt portrayed by Felicity Jones’ Nelly as she struggles to her secret long after the writer has died, that the fixation of the Muse for the artist is one of prevalence and unrivalled passion.
An Invisible Woman is a film of consequence, of surmising that if Charles Dickens had not chased certain avenues and options, then he might have not been scarred by the train accident that would play a part in his eventual early death, but then he also might have gone on to create more works of genius but been hounded out of his mind by a slowly decaying heart filled with nothing more than regret.
To see the story from the other side is a rare commodity to bring to cinema, in this particular film it is an illumination, a revelation of spirit which cannot be denied.
Ian D. Hall