The Invisible Woman (**3/4)

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

Lincoln (***)

Despite the title, this is not a biography, but a film about the legislative process, though with the 16th U.S. president (Daniel Day-Lewis) in the featured role. Though it veritably canonizes the man, it’s still a film for political and historical junkies more than those who simply like films about important personages. Certainly Lincoln did not have the voice of an important personage, if we can believe the historical accounts and Day-Lewis’s attempt at re-creating his thin voice. Instead, he carries the day by always seeming thoughtful and only seeming forceful when the occasion suits.

Partly basing his account on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, utilizing a script by Tony Kushner, director Steven Spielberg focuses on the last four months of Lincoln’s life, in particular the push to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in January 1865. With not enough representatives of Lincoln’s own Republican party to guarantee passage, logrolling, arm-twisting, and the occasion appeal to principal are the order of the day to secure the 20 or so Democratic votes needed. Besides placating his own cabinet, who question the timing of the vote, Lincoln and his designated representatives face two dangers: first, that word of a possible negotiated end to the war will cost the votes of those who only favor the amendment because it might hasten that end, and second, that radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) will frighten potential yes votes by speaking of voting rights and the equality of the races.

By not really challenging any of Lincoln’s actions, the film does not quite place us in the moment in the way a film like Primary Colors, centered around a more obviously flawed politician (based on Bill Clinton), does. That is, one watches the film with the present-day certitude that the president’s course was correct, as we know that it did result in the abolition of slavery. When Lincoln speaks of violating the Constitution to accomplish his larger goal of protecting the union, no character makes a strong argument against his having done so. Will the controversial security policies of the last decade seem as uncontroversial in 150 years? In any case, the film makes the best possible case for pragmatism and for politics in service of principle being a worthy calling.

What does place us in the moment is Day-Lewis’s performance, which would be uncanny even if Lincoln were not a famous figure. His speech sounds decidely pre-modern, in contrast to most of the other actors. His dialogue, filled with Lincoln’s actual recorded words (“flub-dubs” being one insult in the script), contrast also with a few more modern phrasings elsewhere (e.g., “I’ll be fucked,” a figurative phrase that seems out of time). Additionally, the dingy rooms and sets seem appropriate. The amendment and the vote-gathering process account for most of the drama, but the 2.5-hour film also takes time to account for the president’s family life, including a nuanced portrait of his relationships with the First Lady (Sally Field) and older son Robert. (A younger son, Tad, lived at the White House.) The film does move forward to the assassination, and a coda doubles back to Lincoln reading the Second Inaugural Address, famous for speaking of “malice toward none; with charity for all.” As does the clunky opening, the scene looks forward and makes one wish that attitude prevailed everywhere and in every person.

IMDb link

viewed 12/2/12 4:45 pm at Ritz 16 and reviewed 12/2/12

The Conspirator (***)

It may be the JFK assassination that has captured the public imagination of the generations since. But of the four presidential assassins (or seven, counting those who shot at but did not kill a president), only John Wilkes Booth is known beyond doubt to have been part of a conspiracy. And of the eight alleged conspirators tried via military tribunal in the immediate aftermath of President Lincoln’s killing, only one, Mary Surratt, was a woman. As the mother of another suspected conspirator and the owner of a boardinghouse where the Booth and other plotters had held meetings, she was either an abetter of the assassins or merely the victim of unfortunate associations. Robert Redford’s film allows for both possibilities, which makes it a fairer, if less exciting, film than, say, JFK.

This account of Surrat’s trial starts off slightly shakily. It’s a minor point, but how strange to begin a Civil War movie with soldiers telling a joke whose punch line involves a freezer. The first soldier (James McAvoy) never gets to the punch line, but still, between that and his friend being played by Apple Computer pitchman Justin Long, I was taken out of the (1863) moment. The young actors, including McAvoy, who turns out to play the main character, make no attempt at period accents. The assassination itself is staged in unexciting fashion, and the plot advanced via the newspaper clipping techniques so we can get to where the movie really begins. McAvoy is the lawyer asked to defend Surratt.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/1/11