A little too much twirling of parasols
A Quiet Passion 12A Cert, 125 min Terence Davies Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Duncan Duff, Keith Carradine, Jodhi May, Joanna Bacon, Annette Badland, Catherine Bailey
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‘Rigour is no substitute for happiness,” declares a weeping Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) in A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies’s taxing film about the sad, thwarted life of an artist. It’s an exchange that lays out the film’s themes robustly, and ought to be devastating. But alas, too much else is askew in this twittering literary portrait for it to have the emotional – or even intellectual – clout intended.
Beneath the reams of verbiage and parasol-twirling garden talk, there’s a luminous biopic struggling to get out. The film’s early scenes play up the conflict between a young Dickinson (a fine Emma Bell) and her religious schooling, and the friction, too, with her starchily demanding father (Keith Carradine), who permits her to compose her poems by candelight.
They have a dreadful aunt, played with pious pomposity by Annette Badland, whose own bad poetry causes Emily and her siblings to snigger and smirk. But then arrives Emily’s soon-to-be-bosom-buddy Vryling Buffum (Catherine Bailey), and the entire film has a new nemesis. Her every epigram hangs bafflingly in the air. “Never play happy music at a wedding, Emily. It’s too misleading!” Forced smiles all round – and that’s one of her better efforts.
The film swings between poles of lyrical misery and overbright repartee. Davies is clearly positing a link between his heroine’s acute unhappiness and physical decline, and Nixon lets this bitter core envelop her in the film’s shouty final stages.
It’s a mercy that Jennifer Ehle is on hand, as Emily’s heroically supportive sister Lavinia, to give easily the film’s most measured performance. The relationship of these two women, loving and challenging and fighting each other into spinsterhood, deserved a more focused film wholly to itself. It’s a quiet haven in the one we get.