Lovely but overwrought
Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson well secured her immortality in the 1,775 exquisite poems she left behind — just 10 of which were published in her lifetime (under pseudonyms). It wasn’t about fame and recognition. Or was it? “A Quiet Passion,” director Terence Davies’ beautiful but problematic biopic, wastes no time establishing its heroine as iconoclastic. In the first scene, young Emily at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary defies her Puritan trainers by declaring she wants not to be saved by God — or forgotten. In any case, “I won’t be compelled to piety.”
At home in Amherst, Mass., she shocks her very conventional (and very funny) old aunt by dismissing Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” as “gruel” and hailing the gloomy Bronte novelist-sisters, whom the aunt considers “unwholesome.”
“If they wanted to be wholesome,” says Emily, “I imagine they would crochet.”
Assertive and outgoing, the young Emily (Cynthia Nixon) devotes her early morning hours — with that “certain slant of light” — to composing her own unique poetry but grows increasingly isolated as she ages along with her austere father, Edward (Keith Carradine), haughty brother Austin (Duncan Duff) and sister Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle). Marriage? “I can’t imagine myself beyond my family, amongst strangers,” says the poet, who never left her homestead after age 25 — extreme even by that era’s recluses.
She deeply desires to connect with others but not to associate with them. She craves affection and appreciation but finds it only in Lavinia and in outrageously “modern” Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey) as they stroll through the gardens, exchanging irreverent epigrams on New England mores.
As for those glorious poems: She stitches them together in little packets and rails against the only newspaper editor who prints a few: “Sir, you have altered some of my punctuation!” (I know just how she feels.) It’s a funny scene.
We hear the poems in voiceover by Ms. Nixon, who reads them quite well. But we never really see Emily in the act of composing. We want to see the ink, the paper, the handwriting — the creative process made flesh.
Instead, we see too much of her suffering with Bright’s disease — lingering for inordinate lengths of time over terrible seizures. The film’s surfeit of death and dying, coffins and graveside scenes, constitutes a grueling audience endurance test.
Ms. Nixon’s soulful performance as Emily — with her pale face and incredibly long stiff neck! — is wondrous. Ms. Ehle and Mr. Carradine provide excellent support, as does Simone Milsdochter in the role of Rev. Wadsworth’s deliciously dogmatic wife.
Terribly miscast and misdirected, on the other hand, is Ms. Bailey as a wannabe Oscar Wilde. (“Never play happy music at a wedding — it’s too misleading.”)
The painterly camerawork and lighting, awash in Rembrandtian sepias and Vermeerian compositions, are gorgeous, especially the 360-degree pans and slow zooms into the family portraits being taken at a local studio:
“Do you think you could smile, Mr. Dickinson?” the photographer asks.
it’s overwritten and overwrought and — despite the cast’s valiant effort to externalize Dickinson’s inner demons — can’t escape the underlying static script.
Maybe that was inevitable. Unsatisfied and unsatisfiable, Dickinson found solace in art rather than religion, self-exiled in a household that savored the power and meaning of words. She gave us her brilliant new compressed language and slant rhymes — dramatic rather than lyrical — but left us to interpret her “Calvaries of love” and ecstatic bereavement for ourselves.
I like the fact that men tend to be rankled by the idea that a great — let alone the greatest — American poet could be a woman. For all this film’s faults, kudos to Mr. Davies for infusing her tragic themes with humor, while not neglecting her proto-feminist views, but most of all for giving Dickinson and her poems a new and wider audience.