THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

Speranza

A brooding, enigmatic beauty strides across a beach in Margate, England, during the opening moments of “The Invisible Woman.”

The year is 1885.

In a nearby school, a group of boys, rehearsing a play by Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander) and his friend Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes), awaits her return.

We soon learn that the distraught woman, Nelly (Felicity Jones), is married to the school’s headmaster, George Wharton Robinson (Tom Burke).

As the film’s production notes put it,

“For Nelly, the rehearsals are igniting memories of a lost life, one that is still haunting her.”

Despite what this mysterious opening scene might suggest, “The Invisible Woman,” adapted from Claire Tomalin’s biography, is not “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” redux, but the true story of Dickens’s longtime clandestine affair with Nelly Ternan, who was 27 years his junior.

They met in 1857 when Nelly, 18, was appearing in the Collins play “The Frozen Deep,” whose production Dickens oversaw.

The great man was 45.

In 1876, six years after Dickens’s death, Nelly married Robinson, who was 12 years younger, and began a new life out from under the shadows of her secret liaison.

“The Invisible Woman,” directed by Fiennes, takes its time filling in the blanks.

Unlike the typical British period piece descended from the Merchant-Ivory school of Anglophile nostalgia, it purposefully conveys a 19th-century sense of time, which in the movie seems to pass much more slowly than it does today.

Every personal decision and social gesture is consequential in Victorian society, in which the rules of propriety are strictly observed and a perceived indiscretion can destroy a woman’s reputation.

Despite the rowdy bonhomie that accompanied Dickens wherever he went, currents of fear and suspicion lurked behind the scenes.

“The Invisible Woman” reminds you uncomfortably of the degree to which Victorian society was a man’s world.

Virtuous women may have been put on pedestals, but woe to the woman who flouted the rules unless she was prepared to live outside society.

One rebel who appears in “The Invisible Woman” is Collins’s defiantly free-spirited mistress Caroline Graves (Michelle Fairley), whom Dickens takes Nelly to meet.

Kristin Scott Thomas, in one of her least glamorous roles, plays Nelly’s caring widowed mother who, realizing that Nelly’s limited acting talent is a hindrance to a theatrical career, tacitly encourages the relationship as long as it is kept secret.

In depicting Nelly, “The Invisible Woman” slowly fills in the outlines of its reticent title character.

It isn’t until the very end that you see Nelly in all her fullness, a radiantly vital woman happily settled.

Felicity Jones gives a performance of extraordinary subtlety and delicacy.

Observing her is like watching a plant whose buds slowly bloom over time.

Her beauty recalls the young Susannah York in “Loss of Innocence,” a.k.a. “The Greengage Summer.”

You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of “The Invisible Woman” and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film.

Fiennes, best known to millions as Harry Potter’s nemesis Lord Voldemort, gives his warmest, most full-bodied screen performance as Dickens, an irresistibly charismatic, tirelessly energetic celebrity who was the life of every party he attended.

The screenplay by Abi Morgan (“Shame,” “The Iron Lady”) gently depicts the conflict between Dickens’s appetite for the spotlight and his passion and concern for Nelly, whom he tries to protect by burning his letters.

But they are seen together so often that gossip about them spreads even before their relationship is consummated.

In one harrowing scene, a train carrying the couple — with Dickens traveling under an assumed name — derails, threatening to expose their affair.

When the police direct the men on board to assist injured passengers, Dickens is reluctant to leave Nelly’s side, but he does lest suspicions be aroused.

In an unsettling scene that reflects today’s increasingly harsh blame-the-victim attitudes toward the poor and homeless, Dickens pleads for compassion toward the desperate, orphaned children and prostitutes living on the streets of London.

As much as Dickens is shown relishing the spotlight, he is ultimately revealed here as more magnanimous than narcissistic.

And  Fiennes, who often exudes an air of aristocratic reserve, is entirely persuasive as a hearty bon vivant.

In a crucial role, Joanna Scanlan plays Dickens’s wife, Catherine, the portly long-suffering mother of their 10 children.

Far from being the embittered shrew you might imagine, she is a sensitive, supportive helpmate whose inner strength balances any shame and suffering.

Like all the film’s characters, she is a complicated, multilayered human being.

In other words, Dickensian in the fullest sense.

“The Invisible Woman” is rated R (Under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian) for some sexual content.

The Invisible Woman

Opens on Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Ralph Fiennes; written by Abi Morgan, based on the book by Claire Tomalin; director of photography, Rob Hardy; edited by Nicolas Gaster; production design by Maria Djurkovic; costumes by Michael O’Connor; produced by Gabrielle Tana; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes.
WITH: Ralph Fiennes (Charles Dickens), Felicity Jones (Nelly Ternan), Kristin Scott Thomas (Mrs. Ternan), Tom Hollander (Wilkie Collins), Joanna Scanlan (Catherine Dickens), Perdita Weeks (Maria Ternan), Amanda Hale (Fanny Ternan), Tom Burke (George Wharton Robinson), John Kavanagh (William Benham) and Michael Marcus (Charley Dickens).