{"id":9523,"date":"2014-01-12T11:26:24","date_gmt":"2014-01-12T19:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=9523"},"modified":"2014-01-12T11:30:14","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T19:30:14","slug":"the-invisible-woman-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/the-invisible-woman-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Invisible Woman — Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Invisible Woman<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Ralph Fiennes<\/p>\n

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This movie is slow moving and hard to follow.\u00a0 If you don’t know much about Charles Dickens — and most Americans don’t, let’s be real — it is very hard, especially at the outset (that is, for about the first forty-five minutes) to tell what is going on, who the characters are, or what their relationships are to one another.\u00a0 It takes a long time to wind up the propeller on this airplane and get it off the ground.\u00a0 The plot is very simple:\u00a0 an unhappily married man in midlife meets a fresh young woman and has an affair with her.\u00a0 The affair goes badly, however, and they end up separating.\u00a0 That is about all that happens.\u00a0 So in a story like that the interest is going to be in the psychological intricacies of the characters and their relationships to one another.\u00a0 But this film does not succeed in that aspect.\u00a0 It is called “The Invisible Woman.”\u00a0 Presumably, that refers to Nellie (Felicity Jones), but it could more aptly refer to Charles Dickens’ wife, Mary, (Susanna Hislop), who is given short shrift in the movie, and presumably also in life.\u00a0 More broadly, everyone<\/em> in this movie is invisible, including Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes).\u00a0 None of the characters are well drawn.\u00a0 We do see Charles Dickens’ vitality, energy, and his love of celebrity and the acclaim he received for being a famous writer.\u00a0 But we see nothing of what made him tick as a writer, why he wrote the things that he wrote, what inspired him, or the dynamics of his relationships with his women.\u00a0 Nellie is an aloof, self-absorbed young woman, who seems oddly conservative for a man like Charles Dickens.\u00a0 They seem to break up — sort of — after a train wreck in which Nellie is injured.\u00a0 She goes on and establishes a life for herself after Dickens, but none of it has any rhyme or reason.\u00a0 A lot of time and attention and expense has been spent on costumes, settings, and creating the cinematic spectacle.\u00a0 The result, I feel, is rather overstaged.\u00a0 This striving for cinematic perfection gives the film an unreal, illusory quality.\u00a0 Perhaps it mirrors the way the characters and the affair have been portrayed.\u00a0 The whole thing comes off as sanitized and romanticized, which the nineteenth century definitely wasn’t, nor was anything in Charles Dickens’ books.\u00a0 I don’t believe anything in this movie, and it did not make me want to read the book.\u00a0 It is the kind of movie where the more I think about it, the worse it gets.\u00a0 \u00a0I guess that is an indication that I should stop now, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Invisible Woman Directed by Ralph Fiennes       This movie is slow moving and hard to follow.\u00a0 If you don’t know much about Charles Dickens — and most…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"