Poetic justice
Emily Dickinson’s life finally reaches the screen with ‘A Quiet Passion’
“A Quiet Passion” is an exquisite film about the life of Emily Dickinson. Good thing it is, too, since we’re not likely to get another biopic about the great American poet anytime soon.
The crude outline of the Belle of Amherst’s life story, that she was a recluse who spent practically all of her 55 years in her father’s house, ain’t exactly cinematic material. At least according to anybody who’s ever had the wherewithal to make a motion picture, which explains why “Passion” is the first Dickinson biopic.
Fortunately, the singular English filmmaker Terence Davies knew more about her and is used to having hard times funding his movies. (“Passion” took 4½ years to get off the ground.) But while his life of Dickinson may look conventionally uneventful, he draws an emotional and intellectual maelstrom out of star Cynthia Nixon and a sharp supporting cast playing Emily’s relatives and acquaintances, which includes Jennifer Ehle as sister Lavinia, Duncan Duff as brother Austin and Keith Carradine as their dad, Edward.
“I discovered her poetry when I was 18,” says Davies, who’s best-known for his semiautobiographical films about growing up in postwar working-class Liverpool, “The Long Day Closes” and “Distant Voices, Still Lives.” “She’s my favorite American poet, and when I heard about this extraordinary life I read quite a bit and I thought, this is a very powerful story.”
But one with no action. Or conventional romance (for its heroine anyway; Emily got pretty worked-up about her brother’s infidelity, among numerous other topics).
“It’s surprising that, apart from ‘The Belle of Amherst,’ this one-woman play in the 1970s, they’ve never tried to make a movie of Emily Dickinson before,” adds Nixon, who grew up watching the PBS version of “Amherst” and listening to recordings of Dickinson’s poems by its star Julie Harris. “It must be partly because of how solitary she was and the external events of her life are not that dramatic. But the passions inside her, between her and her family members and would-be lovers, were very intense.”
Beside her lifelong appreciation for the poet, Nixon looked right for the part. When producer Sol Papadopoulos imposed a picture of the actress over the only known daguerreotype photo of Dickinson, the similarities were astonishing.
So Davies offered Nixon the part nearly five years ago.
“Cynthia stuck with it all that time,” Davies marvels. “And it was so charming. She said, ‘You’ll never get the money for a film I’m starring in.’ But I knew we would and we got it.”
“It was a no-brainer,” the “Sex and the City” alumna says of the chance to play Dickinson. “I was a little skeptical that he would ever really get it financed. But I said sure, feeling that I had just received a very nice compliment, and it was probably not going to end up being more than that.”
The limited budget they did receive meant that interiors for the film had to be shot in Belgium, but that seemed to work to the picture’s advantage as its lighting evokes the soft brilliance of such Low Country painters as Vermeer. And there was enough money for four crucial days of exterior shooting at the Dickinson homes and gardens in Amherst, Massachusetts.
The key to the film’s success, though, was getting that passion of the title across — not always quietly, but in a deceptively polite 19th-century English that sounds highly mannered to contemporary ears.
Davies says the dialogue he wrote was not slavishly inspired by the volumes of letters Dickinson composed, nor by the wording in her nearly 1,800 ground-breaking poems, less than a dozen of which were known
about before her 1886 death.
“In the 19th century, Americans spoke formally because they were trying to imitate the dominant power, which was Britain,” Davies explains. “Now it’s the other way around; we imitate you! But they spoke very formally. Some of the things she’d said I gleaned from the biographies [he read six before writing the screenplay] and were actually quite formal.
“But these women were very intelligent, and they sparked off each other because of that. That can bring both comedy and tragedy in a large family. I came from a large family, and when siblings had a row, the gloves came off. I said, that’s what’s got to happen within this, what appears to be, hermetically sealed world. But in fact, it wasn’t.”
“I think it’s partially 19th century-speak and partly Terence Davies,” Nixon says of the dialogue. “This is so New England and pinched, it’s like it’s been boiled down to its essence; it’s very concentrated. And in a funny way, it’s very direct.”
Tony and Emmy Awardwinner Nixon says she had no problem speaking Davies’ language. Good thing, that; the performance had enough other intimidating aspects.
“I mean, Emily’s such a genius,” the actress acknowledges. “She’s such an enormous intellect. To try and make oneself believe, and make the audience believe, that I could possibly have been the person who wrote these 1,800-some poems that are so magnificent ... . That’s the first thing that daunted me.
“Also, I’m just a very social person. I was an only child and I really like to be around people. So trying to imagine what a life would be like — day in and day out, year in and year out — so much of which was spent completely alone.”
The results of that lonely, intense contemplation have spoken to Nixon her whole life.
“I think many people who are ardent admirers of her, fans and Emily groupies, we all feel that somehow she sees us and is speaking directly to us,” she says. “Sharing her most intimate thoughts with us, and yet somehow without being crassly revealing. She tells you these most important things to her, but she doesn’t name names and she doesn’t always name the subject of which she’s speaking. You can think that she’s talking about God or she’s talking about writing or she’s talking about love or ... but you know that she knows what she’s talking about. You know the keen way in which she’s observed the details of what she’s thinking and feeling, even if she’s left the subject heading blank.”
Dickinson may have spoken even more powerfully to a gay Catholic lad in mid-20th century England.
“The two things I share with her are wanting the family to be the same and never, never change,” Davies says, “and also her spiritual quest. You have a soul, but what to do if there’s no God or if there is a God. She fluctuates constantly between those two positions, never coming down on either side. She always gives enough hope for you that there might be something after this.”
And after “A Quiet Passion”? Davies has several projects he hopes to find financing for, including a biofilm about a polar opposite poet, British anti-war soldier Siegfried Sassoon.
That might be a pretty pricey production, but even his most modest ones seem that way for Davies. Can that change if his little gem of an Emily Dickinson movie becomes a financial success?
He’s not the kind to think that way.
“The great reward would be if people went out and started to read her,” Davies says.