Although no garments are removed, it’s a more carnal scene than anything in “The Canyons.” No less remarkable is a later encounter between Nelly and Catherine Dickens, in which the spurned wife makes it clear to the mistress that she knows everything that’s going on, without ever saying a word to that effect. Though Fiennes is hardly the first filmmaker to tap into the restrictive social codes and barbed double-speak of the Victorian era, he renders it all with an unusually sharp, unsparing touch that, at its best, recalls Terence Davies’ film version of “The House of Mirth.” In one of the film’s most piercing moments, Dickens entreats Nelly into a late-night accounting session following a charity benefit, her mother drifting in and out of sleep - or pretending to - on an adjacent divan. It is a performance of such fierce emotional control that, on the two occasions when the actress cracks something resembling a half-smile, it is as if a tremor has passed underneath the cinema.

Jones, meanwhile, wears her face in the taut pose of a serious woman at a time when seriousness was not deemed a feminine virtue, letting her guard down only by centimeters as she falls deeper under Dickens’ spell. In a role that seems an invitation to puffed-up flourishes, Fiennes very skillfully keeps Dickens human-scale, clearly a man who craves the adoration of his public (and comely young women in particular), undeniably egoistic, but also flawed and vulnerable in unexpected ways, yearning for love but limited in the compromises he’s willing to make for it. But no one, at least initially, is more concerned about propriety than Nelly herself, who recognizes Dickens’ affections but tries to keep them platonic, and reacts with moral outrage upon a visit to the home shared by Collins (an excellent Tom Hollander), his unwed mistress and their child. Ternan (Thomas), who gives Dickens a stern warning about the need to preserve her daughter’s propriety, even as she tacitly supports the liaison, knowing it may be the best hope for Nelly (who lacks her siblings’ actorly gifts) to advance in society. But these coincidental meetings soon become so frequent that no one can deny their careful planning - not least Mrs.

Elegantly moving between those two time periods and a third - a fateful train journey from Paris to London in 1865 - Morgan and Fiennes trace the slow bloom of Dickens and Ternan’s passion, along with the growing whisper campaign that would ultimately destroy Dickens’ marriage.Īt first, the author merely seems to be hanging around a lot, conveniently passing through on a book tour or speaking engagement wherever the Ternans’ own travels happen to take them.

The frisson between the writer and the aspiring starlet is, however, evident from the start.īack in Margate, living under a married name and dressed head-to-toe in black, Nelly trudges along the windswept beach a solitary, almost ghostly figure - a woman who has clearly lost something, and that something is what “The Invisible Woman” is ultimately about. She is one of three daughters in a “Gypsy”-like family of actresses he is the toast of London high society, with a wife, Catherine (Joanna Scanlan), and a sprawling brood of 10 children in tow. One is a high-school production of Dickens and collaborator Wilkie Collins’ “No Thoroughfare,” directed by Nelly (Jones) in a Margate high school in 1883 (13 years after Dickens’ death) the other is the 1857 Manchester production of Collins’ “The Frozen Deep,” directed by and starring Dickens, and the occasion of his and Nelly’s first encounter. Adapting a 1990 Ternan bio by Claire Tomalin, screenwriter Abi Morgan (“Shame,” “The Iron Lady”) frames the action around two different stagings of Dickens plays.

Felicity jones invisible woman