A Quiet Passion
Cert: Club. Selected cinemas Giving the life of Emily Dickinson the celluloid treatment has been a passion project of UK director Terence Davies for quite some time. Davies (The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song) has often been drawn to stories of women in times past with their backs to the wall, and the grande dame of US verse — who spent her final years as a recluse with only a handful of her almost 2,000 poems published in her lifetime — fits that bill.
Funding issues prevented A Quiet Passion from emerging until now, but it has been largely worth the wait because the world now gets the opportunity to see Cynthia Nixon (yes, of Sex and the City fame) channel Dickinson in one of the better central female performances of the year.
And while Davies’s screenplay does bite off a lot by looking to tell the poet’s life from youth right up to her death at the age of 55, it stays afloat via tracts of breezy Wildean wit more typical of a comedy of manners than a biopic.
After her schooling, we see the teenage Dickinson (Emma Bell) return to the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, to live with her gentle father (Keith Carradine), kindly sister (Jennifer Ehle) and frail mother. By day, there is lots of laughter, chatter and parasol twirling with her sister and friends. By night, she writes by candlelight while the world is asleep. But illness, family deaths and the infidelity of her older brother Austin eat away at her sense of idealism over the years, as does a fruitless connection with a married man.
Although prone to melodrama, Davies’s film is full of rat-tat-tat dialogue and softly spoken verse, while also dabbling in gender politics. Nixon devours the camera.
HILARY A WHITE