Telluride at Dartmouth: "The Invisible Woman"
Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in this period romance about Charles Dickens, who, at the peak of his career, begins an affair with a struggling actress.
Nelly, a quiet Victorian woman, has children, a job as a schoolteacher, a handsome if staid husband … and a dark secret. Years earlier, as a struggling 18-year-old actress, she fell in love with an older, married man who shared her interest in theater. Thus began Nelly’s torrid, long-term affair with Britain’s preeminent creative force, the novelist Charles Dickens. In his second directorial effort, after his visionary Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus, Ralph Fiennes has crafted a rich and poignant man-and-muse story. Can romance survive the suffocating secrecy necessary when loving someone in the spotlight? Fiennes’ striking and convincing performance as Dickens, a man uncomfortable in his own skin, is restrained, compelling and utterly persuasive. (England, 2013, 111m) Courtesy of Sony Classics