The Invisible Woman (2013)

This is a movie about Charles Dickens love affair with Nelly Ternan.  Ralph Fiennes directed the movie based on the biography that Claire Tomalin wrote.  Fiennes plays Dickens as a histrionic peacock of a man who is so focused on himself and his fame that he neglects everyone else except for rare moments of playfulness as a father.  I did not realize that he had an oratory and acting career that paralleled his writing, but that is well laid out in this film.  Felicity Jones plays Ternan, first seen as a lone, cloaked figure striding across the beach, boiling with memories, and then in flashback as the teenage thespian whose delicate beauty and heartbreaking professional uncertainty bewitch the conceited Dickens at the height of his celebrity. Joanna Scanlon gives a shrewd and sensitive performance as Dickens's neglected wife, Catherine, and Kristen Scott Thomas does her usually brilliant job of playing Nelly's mother, complicit in the affair at the start (she is a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughters ahead).

The invisibility of the title alludes to Nelly, whose status in his life Dickens never really acknowledged, but the audience is also apt to see that as the wronged wife, Catherine was also invisible.  Nelly's drawn and haunted mother is also unseen.  Fiennes portrays Dickens as a complex figure: a showman, an egotist and an applause-addict whose lovers and children were his enablers, but also a genuine artist and social idealist. The one thing that comes out of the story that is in Dickens' favor is that Nelly really got him. She was his intellectual equal and a muse who could offer real editorial comments on his work.  She was haunted by her youthful indiscretion with him, even though she went on to have what is portrayed as a good relationship with her future husband.

This is an engrossing if somewhat dramatically told story with excellent performances by the key players.