I had great expectations for this story of Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and his mistress, Ellen Ternan (Felicity Jones), but found it stiff and formal. Ternan, an aspiring actress, was just 18 when she met the 45-year-old Dickens; he cast her in a play he had co-written, in Manchester. She was still living with her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and two sisters, while he was celebrity across the English-speaking world. It was 1857.
The film, with a script by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame) and directed by Fiennes, takes its inspiration from the book of the same name by Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin. Fiennes uses a flashback structure to contrast the 1883 Ternan, by then married and directing children in a Dickens play in seaside Margate, and the earlier version. It doesn’t help that Jones, though a fine actress, looks pretty close to the same age in both sets of scenes.
Mainly though, the relationship at the heart of the story seems relatively passionless except when the two characters are talking about his work, of which she had been a devoted reader. The film could use more establishing scenes and dialogue between the principals, more lust, and fewer pregnant pauses and lingering shots of domestic scenes. A music score might have been used more effectively to underscore the unspoken feelings. It is understandable that a young woman would be awed by a handsome, charming man whom she revered, understandable that he would be attracted to a pretty 18-year-old, but it’s not always apparent. The husband-wife relationship is clearer. Mrs. Dickens was a nice woman without an intellectual connection to her husband. I appreciated the way the film was sympathetic to all of its characters, but in some ways it makes them seem bloodless.
IMDb link
viewed 1/23/14 7:05 pm at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/23/14
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