If period dramas featuring heavy frocked dames gazing woefully over haunted meadows is your thing then you may find much to love in Ralph Fiennes’ jaunt about Charles Dickens and his affair with a teenage actress. Fiennes’ second feature as a director is enriched with marvellous performances, wonderful cinematography and a bleak ambience but it is just so brain achingly dreary. From the brooding, wine label opening the story sifts into a sombre setting with cumbersome characters bouncing gleefully behind beards, frowns and top hats. The protagonists are established and their relationships explored in a manner that doesn’t properly lend itself to the medium and would be better suited in an hour long BBC drama.
Fiennes is truly incredible as Dickens, revealing further, previously uncharted range as a joyous yet flawed Charles, filling the screen with exuberant robustness. But it is the lingering, self-reflective nature of the screenplay and structure that wears it down. This specific area of the writer’s life, centring primarily on a love triangle, isn’t interesting enough to warrant the running time, where a detailed, grandiose story of Dickens’ life could have proved a more ambitious, filmic venture. But The Invisible Woman does have its merits. It is beautiful to look at with misty blue hues and windswept shorelines enhanced by layered performances that work wonders with the middling dialogue (penned by Shame and The Iron Lady writer Abi Morgan).
While social gatherings and protracted silences are lingered on unnecessarily, an atmosphere is conveyed well enough through the delivery and tension between Fiennes, his wife and admirer. But these moments are few, the film sinks where greater drama and layers of conflict are needed, while characters’ inner conflicts aren’t explored enough to account for the lack of narrative drive. The final act is literally a train crash as Dickens and his mistress are flung from the wreckage of a disaster that we never actually witness on screen. Despite Fiennes’ powerhouse performance, there is an aching weariness at The Invisible Woman’s core that leaves the viewer yearning for a more worthy and Dickensian tale of greater scale and depth, something the great writer would be proud of.
The Invisible Woman is released on 7th March