‘Passion’

Emily welcomes Austin’s new wife, Susan ( Jodhi May), with honest sisterly affection, and later lashes out at her brother when he has an affair with a married woman, Mabel Loomis Todd (Noemie Schellens).

For her part, Emily seems to console herself with the knowledge that solitude would be far preferable to a poor match. At other times, she bemoans her physical plainness and the spinsterhood for which she seems destined. She develops feelings for the married Rev. Charles Wadsworth (Eric Loren), who praises and encourages her literary gifts, though his abrupt departure for a parish in San Francisco contributes to a particularly intense, anguished outburst of creativity: “We outgrow love like other things/ And put it in the drawer,/ Till it an antique fashion shows/ Like costumes grandsires wore.”

It’s one in a series of losses that initiates Dickinson’s slow, steady march toward isolation, illness and death. But even as the tonal register constricts, the rooms darken and the story edges almost imperceptibly toward tragedy, “A Quiet Passion” never quite loses its grounding in humor, in the push-pull of voices in vibrant, angry opposition.

A persistent suitor for Emily’s affections is dressed down in spectacular fashion. An overly aggressive editor is similarly taken to task but manages to exact a cruel revenge. Through it all, Vinnie, whom Ehle invests with immense warmth, remains Emily’s closest and sweetest companion.

“A Quiet Passion” beautifully marries two strains in Davies’ earlier work. His semi-autobiographical masterworks, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1989) and “The Long Day Closes” (1993), captured the visual and emotional texture of domestic life, while his later literary adaptations — most notably his magnificent 2000 film of “The House of Mirth” — have revealed him to be an unusually sharp, sensitive portraitist of women, particularly those confined by the unforgiving social mores of an earlier era.

There is something of Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart in Davies’ conception of Emily Dickinson as a woman tragically ahead of her moment, and it is through Nixon’s brilliant performance that “A Quiet Passion” illuminates, complicates and ultimately transcends the mystery of its subject’s confinement. The film’s pursuit of a higher form of artistic truth merges with Dickinson’s own.