Emily Dickinson, a Quiet Passion

I love Dickinson's work, but had my doubts about watching her life unfold. I'm afraid this film confirmed them. This movie feels like a play, not least in the acting which is often stilted - or declarative? - in a stagy way. The dialogue comes with quotes around it; very clever sometimes, but hardly natural. Some of the scenes are drawn out for no apparent reason. And it is way too long. There is some good use of her poetry, especially after one of the best, most nuanced sequences in which one feels the tenderness between her and her bigoted aunt in a beautifully understated way. Would that the whole film had walked such lines as well.

Emily Dickinson isn't the easiest subject for a feature-length biopic. True, she is the greatest female poet in the English language, maybe even in world literature. But her life was uneventful in the extreme. She never married and probably died a virgin. Her love affairs were conducted by correspondence. She became reclusive as she got older, donning a white dress, rarely leaving home, and holding conversations through doorways. She wrote poetry—a kind of literature appealing only to a tiny minority of readers and not amenable to film adaptation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, her poems are difficult: she specialized in extreme mental states and thorny intellectual paradoxes. And she died in complete obscurity—it's only by good fortune that the 1800 poems she wrote still exist. At her death the vast majority of them existed only in a single handwritten manuscript and could easily have been consigned to flame as the ramblings of an eccentric spinster.

So Dickinson's biography hardly conforms to the typical story arc or dramatic requirements of the average American film. Until now, the most successful dramatization of the life of this poet who lived an interior existence, both literally and figuratively, was the one-woman play The Belle of Amherst, which needless to say emphasized her isolation.

Terence Davies's film knows and accepts all this, yet remembers that Dickinson in her own time was not a great poet, except perhaps only in the farthest reaches of her own imagination. Instead of a lonely genius, Davies conjures up a Dickinson who was very much a social being, even if her interactions were largely restricted to her family. Cynthia Nixon's Emily is a flawed, totally plausible, and deeply sympathetic woman of her time.

This is a brilliant film in the way it exploits the resources of the medium. The performances are universally excellent, and the dialogue is as witty as it must have been among clever Emily and her circle. Davies captures the claustrophobic interiors and repressed souls of still- Puritan mid-19th-century small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. The editing and pacing are superb, as for example in a slow 360 degree pan around the Dickinson sitting room that begins and ends on Emily's face.

But it's also brilliant in the way that it interprets Dickinson's life. How did the Civil War impact her Amherst domesticity? Why did she wear a white dress? What did she feel when her brother Austin, who lived with his wife Susan next door, started conducting an adulterous affair in her own living room? How did she feel to be dying slowly and horribly of kidney disease knowing that her poetry (her "Letter to the World" as she put it) was almost totally unread? Did the hope that she'd be appreciated by posterity reconcile her to her fate? Nixon's Emily behaves in each case as a human being would, making her predicament painful to watch. But it's strangely exhilarating too—we watch knowing that Dickinson's "Letter" has most definitely been delivered.

The film is slow-paced and developed as a series of vignettes. There's quite a lot of poetry in voice-over. At no point does it pander to 21st- century sensibilities. It will not be to the taste of the majority of the cinema-going public. Nor will many Dickinson cultists enjoy it, as they often prefer to idealize or mythologize her rather than think of her as a flesh-and-blood woman. But as a plausible biography of one of America's greatest poets, this film is nothing short of a triumph.

The life and poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) is the subject of this biopic, portraying an early feminist who lived life on her own terms within limited situations while facing sadness and despair in her later years. Dickinson was from a prominent family (her father was a lawyer) and lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Writer/director Terence Davies deserves so much credit for this fine film. The first half is blessed with sharp and witty dialogue using language and repartee in a style that is rarely used in today's America. Similarly, Davies' directing style is as poetic as Dickinson's writings which are frequently recited in the background. Even when poetry is not recited, there is a poetic mood that stays throughout the film especially in the second half when the lightness of the early years have passed.

For the most part, the acting is good especially Cynthia Nixon as the adult version of Dickinson. Nixon is especially strong in the later years of despair and illness. But there are moments the actors seem ill at ease with a language that no longer exists in contemporary America. Catherine Bailey portrays a very sharp-witted, independent-minded friend of Emily and her sister. While Bailey is good in the role, some extra pizzazz could have made her a scene-stealer.

The second half is quite serious at it deals with illness, dying, and the despair of living a life that is perceived as only partly lived. One particularly moving scene involved Emily brushing off the kind attention of a sincere, handsome suitor. By the end of this scene, it was easy to feel empathy and sadness for everyone involved.

"A Quiet Passion" was like the experience of visiting a historical home that is open to the public where ropes separate visitors from the rooms. But in this case, the ropes are temporarily removed and we are allowed in as long as we keep a respectful distance. With a fine cast as well as superb lighting, costumes, and set designs, Davies does a great job in recreating a time and place long gone. Viewing this film is a very soulful experience. - dbamateurcritic

The intention here is to create a novel in form and movement. It is like most Davies's films, styled in the same characteristic manner. The form means scenes progress in a way that is reminiscent of Bergman's Cries and Whispers' that is, complete in themselves and not always related to the previous action.

Within this template the film is quite successful: the design and the actors, all contribute to something that strives to make a film about an artist. That may not be very interesting and its presentation is quite static, but then, so were the lives of the people depicted.

Where it is flawed is the script, which, no doubt was crafted with some attention, yet, with a limited set of rhetorical devices: paradox, homily, hyperbole, irony, for instance; it soon becomes quite irritating. So many scenes run through a few set pieces with these rhetorical plays which are intended to amuse but repeat themselves and without any forward motion. There it resembles Bergman too: the self chastising, the self examination, accusation and reproach; the moral duty to become better, and while this may recreate the anxieties of the people involved, it is not accomplished writing.

Unfortunately this film has the moral worthiness of chapel instruction without a better insight into its subject.

The great American poet Emily Dickinson wrote:

"Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality."

Whether or not Dickinson stopped for life, it kindly stopped for her and her immortality is enshrined in the legacy of the 1800 exquisite poems she left, only ten of which were published during her lifetime. She did not leave any commentaries to interpret her work, but left them for us to understand and explain. One interpretation of her life and work is provided by Terence Davies in his film A Quiet Passion, a sympathetic but overwritten and curiously wooden look at her life and the influences that shaped her art. Starring Cynthia Nixon ("The Adderall Diaries") as Emily, Davies traces Dickinson's life in a standard linear format. Raised in the Puritan New England city of Amherst, Massachusetts (the film is shot near Antwerp, Belgium) the poet was lonely and secretive throughout her life, seldom left home, and visitors were few.

She stayed with her family all of her life, living through births, marriages, and deaths but always setting aside the early morning hours in her study to compose. Bright and outgoing as a young woman, Emily is portrayed as becoming more isolated, and bitter as she grows older. Her only companions were her austere and unforgiving father, Edward (Keith Carradine, "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"), a one-term Congressman, her haughty brother, Austin (Duncan Duff, "Island"), who became an attorney and lived next door with his wife Susan Gilbert (Johdi May, "Ginger and Rosa"), and her younger sister, Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle, "Little Men") who was her greatest solace. As the film opens, Emily is tagged as an outsider almost immediately. As a young student (Emma Bell, "See You in Valhalla") at the Mount Holyoke women's seminary, she stands up to the governess by declaring that she does not want either to be saved by divine Providence or forgotten by it and also speaks out for feminism, women's rights and abolitionism.

Her willingness to challenge conventional thinking by dismissing Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha" as "gruel," and her support for the poorly-regarded Bronte sisters was not appreciated by her family. "If they wanted to be wholesome," she retorted, "I imagine they would crochet." As Davies cleverly morphs the faces of Emily and her well-to-do family from children into adults, a clearer picture emerges of her relationship with her strict father and reserved mother (Joanna Bacon, "Love Actually"). Her only refuge from family conflicts and disappointments was her intimate relationship with Vinnie, the companionship of her best friend Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey, "The Grind"), and the sermons of Reverend Wadsworth (Eric Loren, "Red Lights"). Irreverent and provocative, Emily, Vinnie, and Vryling are shown walking through the gardens, exchanging witty aphorisms while they twirl their parasols, but the element of artifice is overbearing.

We do not see Emily in the process of composition but listen to her poems read aloud in voice-over. They are the highlight of the film, but there are not enough of them and too much time is spent on Emily's sad physical deterioration as she confronts the debilitating Bright's disease. In this regard, there is no subtlety in the film's presentation as the camera unnecessarily lingers over Emily's shaking fits for an inordinate length of time and her last days are an endurance test for the audience. In spite of the family's strong religious approach to life, there is no reflection about her life and legacy or talk about life's meaning and purpose.

Though Emily Dickinson's poetry glimmers with a spiritual glow, the uniqueness of who she is does not fully come across. For all of its fine performances and moments of comic satire, A Quiet Passion is dramatically inert, and its stilted and mannered dialogue is an emotional straitjacket with each character talking to the other as if they were reading a book of aphorisms. Terence Davies has directed some memorable period films in his career such as his remarkable adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. A Quiet Passion, however, has neither quiet nor passion. Gratitude must be offered, however, to Davies for introducing the poems of Emily Dickinson to a wider audience. Thanks Terence and thanks Emily.

"You left me, sweet, two legacies, A legacy of love A Heavenly Father would content, Had He the offer of; You left me boundaries of pain Capacious as the sea, Between eternity and time, Your consciousness and me"