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.

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.

Emily Dickinson lived her entire life (1830-1886) in Amherst, Massachusetts, rarely leaving the town and, in middle age, not even leaving the family home. She never married and, in this biopic, only once falls seriously in love – with a married vicar who almost certainly did not know of her "quiet passion". A young man who courts her later in the movie has to talk to her unseen at the top of the stairs.

Dickinson's life lacks the stuff that might make a substantial movie. Cynthia Nixon does a valiant job of giving her substance – in conversations and arguments with her sister (Jennifer Ehle), her father (Keith Carradine, looking like a Mount Rushmore effigy) and visitors and relatives – but what little drama there is here comes from illness and death scenes, of which there are many, long drawn out. The overdone manners of the era are parodied in drawing-room scenes borrowed from Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde, scenes that are pleasingly comic but seem more than a little contrived. Nixon reads some of the verse in voice-over but the early efforts, celebrating Nature, are not in Walt Whitman's league and only the later poems anticipating (almost inviting) Death have any real resonance. It is for these that Emily Dickinson is mostly remembered.

The cinematography is splendid, and the costumes and the over- furnished sets convey a stifling sense of the period. A moment in which portraits of the younger Dickinsons morph into their older selves is exquisite and there's another nice one at the end. The script – and the direction – struggle to make a mountain out of the molehill that was Emily's life. I was constantly thinking how much more 'oomph' there is in an Austen or a Brontë adaptation.

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.

"A Quiet Passion" from 2016 is a beautifully photographed and produced film about Emily Dickinson, here played by Cynthia Nixon. Some may be more familiar with the old Julie Harris vehicle about Dickenson, The Belle of Amherst, which she performed on stage.

As a young woman, Dickinson attended a female seminary but ultimately returned home to her family. She was very opinionated and rigid in her beliefs and considered eccentric. She became more and more reclusive and later on refused to leave her bedroom.

She wrote beautiful poetry, much of which was discovered after her death.

Dickinson was a troubled woman, preoccupied with death and no doubt suffered from depression which worsened over the years. She may have also been agoraphobic.

The film, written and directed by Terence Davies was overly long, slow, and boring, done in a pretentious manner. Someone who saw it the same time as I did described it as "starched." It did not draw in this viewer.

The acting was good, with Nixon doing a fine job as Emily and Jennifer Ehle, whom many remember from the wonderful Pride & Prejudice some years ago, gave a lovely performance as her sister Lavinia. Keith Carradine played their father; he was excellent and inspired casting.

"A Quiet Passion" was obviously a labor of love for Davies and for Nixon, and much care was taken with it. For me, it wasn't energized or accessible enough to truly enjoy, which is a shame, as it was treated too preciously.