Toronto Standouts: 'An Invisible Woman' and the end of slavery

Among the studio blockbusters lined up like rockets for awards season two lush costumers have emerged as audience and critic faves: An Invisible Woman directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens; and Belle directed by Amma Asante and showcasing rising young thesp Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Literary historians have long known that Dickens loved and shared a parallel life with the actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, a woman he met at the height of his fame when she was seventeen (the age of one of his ten children).  Drawing on Claire Tomalin’s book about this liaison, Fiennes, in his second stint as director after Coriolanus, mounts a romantic and meticulously observed saga of a love that social conventions of the period forced into the shadows.

Film opens with a striking image of Nelly (Felicity Jones), a tiny figure in black furiously pacing the vast beach at Margate.  It's been some time since Dickens has died, Nelly's now married–in a remote, dutiful way–and teaching drama to children.  She remains haunted, though, by her past with Dickens, which Fiennes recreates in sumptuous flashbacks.  (Filmmakers currently seem enamored of starting a story with its ending, then looping back to the earlier years.) 

As we knew he would, Fiennes makes a magnificent Dickens, capturing the ambition and lusty energy of the man – “I walk at quite a pace,” he warns – and his longing, in the midst of family and a curiously modern celebrity, to forge an intimate connection.  Echoing married men since the days of Charlemagne, he tells Nelly his wife understands nothing about him. In an exquisite courting scene, Dickens and Nelly cement their bond with shared confidences across a table, while Nelly’s mum (Kristin Scott-Thomas) snoozes on a chaise nearby.

Fiennes brings to live the dim, feverishly lit Victorian interiors and a world of fellow writers and thesps, including Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander) whose open liaison with his mistress almost sends Nelly packing. “So this is how it will be,” Nelly finally tells Dickens in a poignant scene. Equally “invisible,” of course, is Dickens’s cast-off wife (Joanna Scanlan, marvelous) who in a quietly devastating encounter warns Nelly about the writer’s fierce self-absorption.  A gifted director, Fiennes enlivens this exquisite period drama with painterly touches: a day at the races could be early Degas.  He also drops brief stretches of silence into the narrative as a linking device to mark the passage of time. Keeping faith with the Victorian sensibility, Fiennes conveys love through the eyes – “no need to show thrashing limbs,” as he said during a Q & A following the gala screening. 

A hallmark of TIFF 2013 is the way filmmakers have seized on true stories.  Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave is based on the journal of one Simon Northup.  Similarly, Belle by Amma Asante -- in some sense a counterpoise to McQueen’s slave drama – relates the real-life journey of Dido Elizabeth Belle, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, a revelation.  An 18th century woman of mixed race, Dido, (as she’s called) is raised in England in opulent style by a high-ranking judge (Tom Wilkinson)and his family, but because of her color is treated like a second class citizen.  Then Dido inherits a fortune from her father, a Captain in the Royal Navy, upping her appeal--though not to most “respectable” suitors.  Meanwhile the judge’s beautiful blonde niece (Sarah Gadon) can’t snag a husband because she lacks a dowry.

While the set-up is very Jane Austen, the film’s larger issue has to do with the push to end slavery, the life blood of the British economy.  Into Dido’s life comes Davinier (Sam Reid, perfectly cast), a hot-headed – and hot-looking -- fledgling lawyer hell bent on mounting a criminal case against a slave-trading ship that drowned its slaves in order to collect insurance money. Essentially, Belle is the coming-of-consciousness story of both Dido as she helps Davinier expose the horrific massacre, and of England, as prominent lawmakers condemn the practice of slavery.  Yes, you can see almost immediately where the film is heading.  Cue the violins as love and enlightenment come together.  I won’t disagree with a fellow critic who termed Belle “rather schmaltzy.”  Yet the actors–particularly Tom Wilkinson as the judge and the elegant Mbatha-Raw–carry it off with style, and the story itself is both exotic and uplifting.