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pick of the week
theateR Listings
The Invisible Woman
fRidaY, JanuaRY 24 thuRsdaY, JanuaRY 30 Due to possible scheduling changes, moviegoers may want to confirm showtimes with theaters.
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diRectoR: Ralph Fiennes
asheviLLe piZZa & brewing co. (254-1281) please call the info line for updated showtimes. 2 guns (r) 10:00 Lee Daniels’ the butler (pg-13) 7:00 walking with Dinosaurs 3D (pg) 1:00, 4:00
pLaYeRs: Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Kristin ScottThomas, Tom Hollander, Joanna Scanlan, John Kavanagh biogRaphicaL dRama Rated R
carMike cineMa 10 (298-4452)
the stoRY: Biographical film about the relationship between Charles Dickens and his younger mistress. the Lowdown: Complex, heavily layered and textured biographical drama that also serves as a critique of the role of women in Victorian society. The only problem is that its deliberate pace will be off-putting to some.
Ralph Fiennes’ second directorial effort, The Invisible Woman, is something of a puzzlement. It’s definitely a more successful work than his first film, Coriolanua (2011), and it’s considerably more interesting. It tells the story of Charles Dickens’ (Fiennes) love affair with Ellen “Nelly” Ternan (Felicity Jones) — an affair that started at the peak of Dickens’ fame and lasted for the remainder of his life. The film takes an unusual approach to the material, working in the most heavily layered manner I’ve seen in a biographical film since Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974). (Interestingly, David Collings, who played Hugo Wolf in Mahler, has a small role here.) The similarity is probably not coincidental — especially considering the imagery — but do not take this comparison too far.
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JanuaRY 22 - JanuaRY 28, 2014
RaLph fiennes stars as Charles Dickens in The Invisible Woman, a rich but leisurely paced film that Fiennes also directed.
The Invisible Woman is no Mahler. It’s a much more deliberately paced (frankly, it’s rather slow) and reticent film. It is, if anything, too genteel and respectable for its own good, which is something of a curiosity given the material. The Invisible Woman is good. Make no mistake about this. It’s solidly produced, beautifully photographed and wonderfully acted. Fiennes proves himself more interested in making a good movie than he is in showcasing his own performance. His Dickens is certainly compelling — his public reading from David Copperfield is mesmerizing — but the film mostly belongs to his co-star, Felicity Jones. That’s not gallantry, since the title tells you that the story is more about this shadowy figure in Dickens’ life than it is about Dickens himself. It’s the story of a woman who found herself in love with a famous married man and proceeded to enter into a long, more or less secret relationship with him, knowing it could never end well. She sees the relationship as analagous to the supposedly happy
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— but really very ambiguous — second ending of Great Expectations. The film is actually about a good deal more than Nelly’s invisibility. It constantly comments on the position of all women in Victorian society — something Nelly’s mother (Kristin Scott-Thomas) tries to impress on her daughter. Catherine (Brit TV actress Joanna Scanlan in a heartbreaking performance), may be Dickens’ wife, but Dickens is quite able to simply blot her out of his mind. (There’s even a perhaps too literal scene of a wall being constructed between them.) For all his talk about smashing the way the world works, Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander, About Time) keeps his mistress out of the picture as much as possible, which suggests that his idea of a new world is more for men than for women. Dickens himself seems to echo this view in his relationship with Nelly. There is a singularly telling scene where Nelly is loudly reproaching Dickens on a street, and all a passing policeman wants to know is whether
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