Emily Dickinson, a Quiet Passion

• He's not even capable of making up his mind. - That's because he's too stupid to have one.

You'd expect this kind of witty dialogue in a Woody Allen film about condescending New York intellectuals. But 'A Quiet Passion', about 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, is also full of it. Clearly, she used her talent not only to write poetry, but also to engage in spirited conversation.

British director Terence Davies shows Dickinson as a person who refused to stick to the strict rules of life in the Victorian era. She had a mind of her own, and was not afraid to speak out. At the same time, she seemed to have trouble finding happiness. The most tragic element of her life was that her poetry was hardly appreciated. Only a few poems were published in the local paper.

All this is subtly shown in the biopic, which follows Dickinson from her childhood to her death. The poems are read by a voice-over, which is not the easiest way to appreciate poetry. But at the same time, the poems are a necessary element to understand Dickinson as she was.

Cynthia Nixon gives a good, restrained performance. It's nice to see her in a role that's the complete opposite from the career lawyer Miranda in 'Sex and the City'.

Director Davies doesn't speed things up. The film is a calm and quiet affair, which is good because Dickinson's life itself was calm and quiet. Some scenes are beautiful just because they are unhurried: in one scene, the camera moves extremely slowly around Dickinson's living room, lingering on walls and doors as well as on the people present.

If you are acquainted with Emily Dickinson's work, this film gives an interesting insight into her life and her poetry. If you're not, this film is a great introduction to it.

Written and directed by Terence Davies, this film brings out several key points in the life of the great American poet Emily Dickinson: her growing reclusiveness, the fact she dressed in white, the small number of poems she published (in fact she wrote some 1800), her admiration for the Brontës and the major illness she contracted. In one comic scene, she scolds the local newspaper editor for changing her punctuation. This also reflects a key point because her poems are, curiously, full of capitalised initial letters and dashes.

Sadly, though, I think the film's dialogue lets it down. There are a number of epigrams which sound like a pastiche of Oscar Wilde, e.g. (quotations aren't all verbatim) 'Virtue is vice in disguise', 'Admiration is another name for envy', 'Envy is another name for admiration' and 'Contempt breeds familiarity'. Such self-conscious quips are rather distracting, except, I would say, from Dickinson's Aunt Elizabeth.

Despite its title, the film isn't exactly quiet. The characters are very talkative and Dickinson seems to be confined to her room only by her illness. Her physical deterioration is, however, really terrifying; I'd even say it's the strongest part of the film. Another strength lies in the poems that are read in voice-over. Though there aren't many, they do include 'This World is Not Conclusion', which distils her profound sense of the mystery of existence. Expressing this in the film, she displays an unorthodox view of religion which scandalises her family.

Cynthia Nixon sustains the role of Dickinson quite impressively, but Jennifer Ehle seems to me to have more charm as her sister Lavinia ('Vinny'). As Aunt Elizabeth, Annette Badland almost steals the show. It's just a pity that she's only on for a short time near the beginning.

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.

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.

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.