A Quiet Passion

It was an act of either supreme bravery or utter cluelessness on the part of Terence Davies to make a biopic about Emily Dickinson. The "belle of Amherst" may have been a great writer, but any motion picture showing her life and work is automatically and severely challenged by her cloistered and reclusive existence. Since Dickinson hardly ever left her family's house for many years and saw very few visitors most of the time, there is almost no "motion" to portray in a film about her. I suspect many viewers will find this film -- however beautiful to look at and however carefully wrought on the technical side -- insufferably slow and claustrophobic. One does not need to be addicted to big-budget movie chase scenes, violence and explosions to find "A Quiet Passion" trying on many levels. One level on which the film is most trying is the almost relentless sadness and loss that pervade Emily's story. We see her genius go unrecognized and the frustration and bitterness that causes her; we see her father die; we see, even more graphically, her mother die; we see Emily's severe health problems and symptoms most graphically of all; and then we see Emily's death also. For most of the film it really is one calamity after another. The only relief amidst this dirge comes from a few comic interludes between Emily and a saucy neighbor named Vryling Buffam. The acting is capable, although sometimes the 19th century dialogue is not well suited to the actors' temperaments. This seemed especially true in the case of Emma Bell who played the young Emily. Cynthia Nixon gives her all to the title role, even though the script does not always furnish her with the raw materials to show her delightful talent to its best advantage. I'd really like to recommend "A Quiet Passion" because I believe very strongly in what the movie is trying to do, but my viewing experience was not what I'd hoped it would be. If you go, and I'm not exactly saying you shouldn't, it's best to know what you're getting yourself into. And now you know.

There are two things that spoil this movie: 1) The actors are simply not up to the task especially when it involves reciting poetry. (We went home and watched a DVD of Judi Densch in Ibsen's Ghosts and the contrast between actors who know how to read their lines and actors who don't was striking.) 2) The movie is far too melodramatic. There are other lesser problems too. Characters refer to male-female issues as "Gender" which is the modern PC way to put it while in the 19th century and through half of the 20th century it was simply called "Sex". Does no one remember the job applications that said SEX: M or F? This is the way it was and, if the movie was to be more accurate, the way it used to be in the 19th century too. In all this is the Simon and Garfunkel version of "and you read your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost". Here's hoping they don't do another movie of the latter.

After the disappointment of of "Sunset Song" Terence Davies has made a storming comeback with "A Quiet Passion", though it is quietude rather than 'storming' that is most applicable. Expect nothing more or less from Davies than more of the same, of course. Davies makes slow films and "A Quiet Passion" is no different from anything else he has given us nor would we want it to be. This time his subject is the poet Emily Dickinson and this is easily one of the greatest of all period films. Davies sketches Dickinson's life in a series of brush strokes from rebellious youth to painful death in early middle-age through a series of short, sharp conversation scenes, mostly with members of her own family together with readings from her poetry and the detail he packs into these scenes is extraordinary. He is helped in this by his brilliant cast. What we have here is an ensemble performance of the highest order; from the supporting cast it's almost impossible to single anyone out though I doubt if either Keith Carradine or Jennifer Ehle have ever been better while Cynthia Nixon is quite magnificent as Dickinson. Nothing she has done in the past quite prepares you for this; it's an indelible performance as fine, indeed, as Gillian Anderson's in "The House of Mirth" but then Davies has always been a great director of women, going all the way back to "Distant Voices, Still Lives". Perhaps this has something to do with his sexuality, perhaps not; perhaps his being a gay man has nothing to do with anything, though one only has to look to Cukor to see a connection. He is also a remarkably fine writer with a perfect 'ear' for dialogue regardless of the period in which his films are set. Of course, "A Quiet Passion" won't light up the sky when it comes to the box-office. This is a film for aficionados but anyone willing to embrace its multitudinous charms will be amply rewarded. Personally, I think it's a masterpiece.

I couldn't wait for this movie to end. Within the first half, I wished I could reach through the screen and strangle the characters portraying Emily and Susan. Both seemed to delight in their own incessant, yet insipid, comments, thinking it would delight the audience as witty repartee. This constant need to appear clever and superior to everyone else was grating on the nerves and lost what very little charm it possessed within 5 minutes of exposure to it. Emily Dickinson is portrayed as a woman so in love with her own intellect, independence and wit that, though she obviously desired it, there was no room to accommodate the ego of a partner in her life. Her own ego had left no space for anyone else. Cassandra Clare, in her book "City of Bones", aptly states, "Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt." We might say something similar with respect to the unimaginative banter passed off in this movie as wit and cleverness.

This is the worst film I have ever seen. I'm not even sure I can say I've seen it since me and my girlfriend walked out of the theater 20 minutes in. It's not even the fun type of bad that many low-budget films are, it seems to take itself quite seriously, and it seriously fails to deliver. I created an IMDb account solely to warn others about the atrocity that is A Quiet Passion. The script had horrible, constant exposition. It felt like the characters were reading Emily Dickinson's Wikipedia page with the occasional stab at an 1800's joke. From what I saw, it looks like the Wikipedia page would be more accurate, too. The performances were lacking. I'm not ever sure the actors were at fault, since the script was so completely unconvincing, but I didn't believe there was an ounce of genuine emotion displayed in the 20 minutes of the film I could bear to watch. The sound mixing was ironic for a film with "quiet" in its title. There was very loud opera music for what felt like an eternity. Also, random shouting. The only things I liked about A Quiet Passion were the sets, the cinematography, and the color. I didn't like them enough to stay, and I strongly encourage casual moviegoers to stay away from this film.

Anyone who has read anything about Dickinson, or truly read and appreciated her poetry, is guaranteed to hate with a passion (not so quiet either) this dreary and disgusting "biopic". Not only does it indulge in the stupidest clichés (religion bad; 19th century repressive etc etc); its basic understanding of the relation between art and personality is lower than your average undergraduate's. Blaring out (in indigestible "dialogue") the dumber bits of Freud, anachronistically placing into the mouths of ED and clan ridiculous lines about bitterness being "your defense," the film wants us to learn (it's pure cod-liver-oil didacticism) how Death surrounded her and so she wrote about...Death. (Of course the voice-over renditions of ED poems also grate like nails on a chalkboard.) The director's total lack of creative ideas when it comes to depiction of pain and suffering means that he thinks he's being profound when he shows us, interminably, ED (and her mother) gasping, flopping around, getting chloroformed and so forth. IF you love Dickinson, or ever hope to read her poetry with an open mind, flee! Do NOT see this movie, even if it's the only flick left on a trans-Atlantic flight. (Looking at its gross $$ so far, it's bound for airplane glory pretty soon...).

Never has the phrase, "I suffer for my art, now it's your turn," been more apt. Cynthia Nixon is actually very good as tortured poet Emily Dickinson. It's just that the script is way too sluggish. And directory Terence Davies so slavishly wishes to depict Emily's dour, dark, indoors world, not to mention her black as pitch interior psyche, that he forgets how maudlin it comes across to the audience. Mozart's life was hardly a barrel of laughs, yet the movie Amadeus was moving and full of life. I didn't walk out of the cinema during this film, but too many scenes in A Quiet Passion involved Emily and her family sitting in a very dark room spouting earnest and meaningless dialogue, like a particularly wooden 1940s radio play. And when there were lively scenes, they mostly involved someone dying, or Emily ranting to her sister, or being nasty to a stranger. You can't accuse Davies of sugar-coating Dickinson, like some biopic directors do. And Dickinson, admittedly, does seem to be a hard subject to portray. But it's such a shame the sunny early scenes descend into wrist-slashing gloom by the end of the film. Why couldn't Davies focus on the people Emily exchanged letters with? What about showing how her poems were saved after her death? Why weren't there scenes about how generations have been inspired by her work? She may have changed lives. Instead we get a turgid parlour piece that was so dim I thought I might be going blind. I kept expecting Will Ferrell to walk in and declare it all a spoof. But no luck.

I dragged myself to see a film about someone I knew nothing about - except from a line in a Simon and Garfunkel song - and the odd mention from friends years ago - assuming it could easily be a scriptwriters fantasy world - but at least a costume drama outlining the person, her surroundings and time. It was in fact very moving - drawing you into a the completely unknown mind of this women and the people around her - no one left the cinema immediately but just stayed and stared - were they as upset as I was ? It was all the more interesting coming one day after a very interesting documentary of the journey of the Mayflower migrants from 1608 when they fled to Holland for a new life and then to a ship in 1620 to cross the Atlantic so their children would still be English and not Dutch puritans - the documentary forces you to step into the minds and motives of these people, who should have perished but managed to survive due to a powerful faith - which appears just nonsense to me - but it does come from the times - the evolution of human consciousness. Emily Dickinson is there 200 years after - still in a fossilized society - soon to be taken over by Irish Catholicism in Boston - in a style reminiscent of a theater play of the day - at first too witty and full of riposte, but which slowly takes hold of you. The actors are all good, but the driving force is the question of what it was like to be a woman in this time - what did they actually think and do - why did Emily and her sister not marry but stay at home - was the world outside, and the society of men, so cold, foreign and formal that they stayed where they were sure there was warmth. A good film if you want to realize you don't really understand how other people see the world - and to be moved by the fact they simply exist and feel, and are then snuffed out like a candle flame.

The intention here is to create a novel in form and movement. It is like most Davies's films, styled in the same characteristic manner. The form means scenes progress in a way that is reminiscent of Bergman's Cries and Whispers' that is, complete in themselves and not always related to the previous action. Within this template the film is quite successful: the design and the actors, all contribute to something that strives to make a film about an artist. That may not be very interesting and its presentation is quite static, but then, so were the lives of the people depicted. Where it is flawed is the script, which, no doubt was crafted with some attention, yet, with a limited set of rhetorical devices: paradox, homily, hyperbole, irony, for instance; it soon becomes quite irritating. So many scenes run through a few set pieces with these rhetorical plays which are intended to amuse but repeat themselves and without any forward motion. There it resembles Bergman too: the self chastising, the self examination, accusation and reproach; the moral duty to become better, and while this may recreate the anxieties of the people involved, it is not accomplished writing. Unfortunately this film has the moral worthiness of chapel instruction without a better insight into its subject.

Emily Dickinson isn't the easiest subject for a feature-length biopic. True, she is the greatest female poet in the English language, maybe even in world literature. But her life was uneventful in the extreme. She never married and probably died a virgin. Her love affairs were conducted by correspondence. She became reclusive as she got older, donning a white dress, rarely leaving home, and holding conversations through doorways. She wrote poetry—a kind of literature appealing only to a tiny minority of readers and not amenable to film adaptation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, her poems are difficult: she specialized in extreme mental states and thorny intellectual paradoxes. And she died in complete obscurity—it's only by good fortune that the 1800 poems she wrote still exist. At her death the vast majority of them existed only in a single handwritten manuscript and could easily have been consigned to flame as the ramblings of an eccentric spinster. So Dickinson's biography hardly conforms to the typical story arc or dramatic requirements of the average American film. Until now, the most successful dramatization of the life of this poet who lived an interior existence, both literally and figuratively, was the one-woman play The Belle of Amherst, which needless to say emphasized her isolation. Terence Davies's film knows and accepts all this, yet remembers that Dickinson in her own time was not a great poet, except perhaps only in the farthest reaches of her own imagination. Instead of a lonely genius, Davies conjures up a Dickinson who was very much a social being, even if her interactions were largely restricted to her family. Cynthia Nixon's Emily is a flawed, totally plausible, and deeply sympathetic woman of her time. This is a brilliant film in the way it exploits the resources of the medium. The performances are universally excellent, and the dialogue is as witty as it must have been among clever Emily and her circle. Davies captures the claustrophobic interiors and repressed souls of still- Puritan mid-19th-century small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. The editing and pacing are superb, as for example in a slow 360 degree pan around the Dickinson sitting room that begins and ends on Emily's face. But it's also brilliant in the way that it interprets Dickinson's life. How did the Civil War impact her Amherst domesticity? Why did she wear a white dress? What did she feel when her brother Austin, who lived with his wife Susan next door, started conducting an adulterous affair in her own living room? How did she feel to be dying slowly and horribly of kidney disease knowing that her poetry (her "Letter to the World" as she put it) was almost totally unread? Did the hope that she'd be appreciated by posterity reconcile her to her fate? Nixon's Emily behaves in each case as a human being would, making her predicament painful to watch. But it's strangely exhilarating too—we watch knowing that Dickinson's "Letter" has most definitely been delivered. The film is slow-paced and developed as a series of vignettes. There's quite a lot of poetry in voice-over. At no point does it pander to 21st- century sensibilities. It will not be to the taste of the majority of the cinema-going public. Nor will many Dickinson cultists enjoy it, as they often prefer to idealize or mythologize her rather than think of her as a flesh-and-blood woman. But as a plausible biography of one of America's greatest poets, this film is nothing short of a triumph.