That Charles Dickens had a longstanding affair with the actress Ellen Ternan, who was 28 years his junior, is widely accepted by scholars. But there’s almost no documentation; he burned his correspondence, and Ternan (known as Nelly) was tightlipped.
So when Ralph Fiennes decided to direct a film based on Claire Tomalin’s book about Ternan, “The Invisible Woman,” he and screenwriter Abi Morgan had some latitude. The film’s interiors have a pleasing, russet glow via cinematographer Rob Hardy.
Fiennes’ Dickens is sharply observed: a man of the people, enjoying his celebrity and coming alight whenever he’s in a theater. At the same time, Dickens is unhappy in his marriage and coldly neglectful of his wife, Catherine. As Catherine, Joanna Scanlan is a revelation; the scene in which she takes the full measure of her husband’s betrayal is the high point of the drama.
But Dickens is determined to have his Nelly, and, as played by Felicity Jones, Nelly is numbingly morose. The woman who enchanted the world’s greatest comic novelist can scarcely force herself to crack a smile. Plus Dickens may be a charmer, but here he’s also a deceitful louse. Jones plays Ternan as fearful, trapped, depressed, regretful, anything except attracted to the man she had an affair with for more than a decade.
Ternan comes from an acting family, but she has little stage aptitude, and that worries her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). Thomas deftly conveys how her character pushes her own daughter on a married man, her motives a mix of the mercenary and the protective. One scene that does work beautifully shows Ternan entertaining Dickens late at night in her home. As the conversation between the two becomes subtly, but unmistakably, about the possibility of an affair, Ternan’s mother dozes on the couch. Just the way Thomas has arranged her body leaves open the possibility that she is hearing every word.
Ternan is, sadly, a less engaging character than any of the “fallen women” in Dickens’ novels, and surely it didn’t have to be that way. A scene with Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander), romping through the house he shares with a woman he never married, demonstrates that even back then, adultery wasn’t necessarily all clutched foreheads and shamefaced regrets. By refusing to consider that Dickens and Ternan ever brought each other any happiness, the movie is more Victorian in its attitudes than even some Victorians were.