Wild Nights with Emily

source: Wild Nights with Emily

"Wild Nights with Emily" is a biopic of the poet Emily Dickinson, based around what might be called a revisionist account of her life. The film starts from the assumption that traditional literary scholarship has tended to portray Dickinson, wrongly, as a shy, reclusive, virginal spinster whose poems were inspired by unrequited love for men. Its express purpose seems to be to correct this mistaken impression, showing her as a woman who enjoyed many friendships with other women and who had a long-lasting lesbian relationship with her friend Susan Gilbert. According to this thesis Susan also became her sister-in-law, entering into a lavender marriage with Emily's brother Austin in order to have closer and easier access to Emily herself. (Austin and Susan had children together, so perhaps their marriage might not have been as lavender as the film makes out). The idea of Emily as a shy virgin apparently originated with her first editor, Mabel Todd, who also happened to be Austin Dickinson's mistress, and who after Emily's death expunged all mention of other women- especially Susan- from her work. Mabel's motive was partly to make the poems less shocking, and therefore more saleable in the puritanical climate of late nineteenth-century America, but she may also have been motivated by a dislike of Susan, her rival for Austin's love. I decided to watch the film when it recently turned up on British television, but unfortunately it does not work very well as a biography. The action tends to jump about between three periods- 1840, when Emily, here portrayed as a beautiful teenager, is falling in love with Susan, the early 1860s, when she is starting to develop as a poet, and the 1890s, after Emily's death when Mabel is campaigning to establish her reputation as a major literary figure. The abrupt switches from one period to another could make the action difficult to follow at times. The timeline does not always accord with the facts of Dickinson's life; in 1840 she would still have been a young child, and in the middle period, when she would only have been in her early thirties, she is portrayed as a rather plain middle-aged woman. I felt that Molly Shannon, 54 at the time, was miscast in the leading role which should have gone to a younger actress. "Wild Nights with Emily" is the sort of title which you might associate with softcore *, but the film is not actually pornographic; the nature of the relationship between Emily and Susan is made clear, but there are no explicit sex scenes. The jokiness of the title is not, however, inappropriate, because the film is in many ways a comedy, treating much of Dickinson's life-story in a light-hearted way, even though, from what I have read of her poetry, she seems to have been a rather serious-minded individual. The male characters, in particular are treated as figures of fun, especially an elderly judge who treats us to a summary of that well-known Bronte sisters novel "Wuthering Jane". (He has confused the plot of "Wuthering Heights" with that of "Jane Eyre"). Emily's mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in real life a noted advocate of the rights of women, is here portrayed as comically sexist, treating Emily with patronising condescension. The film-makers do just enough to persuade me that Emily Dickinson's life, and her relationship with Susan Gilbert, could have been the subject of an interesting film. Unfortunately, what they have made isn't that film. Director Madeleine Olnek said that it was important to include comedy because "some people don't like to be lectured about feminism". She ought to realise that taking your subject-matter seriously is not the same as lecturing people. 4/10.

On the positive side, there was some interesting information about Dickenson's poetry being "cleaned up" after her death, to blot out things that might suggest "Unnatural Passions". And the secondary leads, Amy Ziegler as the beloved sister in law Susan and Amy Seimetz as the scheming Mabel, were very well acted and created three dimensional characters. On the negative side, this simply did not work at all as a movie. Going from a play to a movie is often difficult -- think how many times the late great Robert Altman tried it and consistently failed. The characters were inconsistent; the dialog was often stilted and unnatural; the attempts to liven up the poems were appalling. The humor was all over the place, and even when the humor was successfully funny, it seemed out of place. Molly Shannon as Emily did best when doing funny non-reactions to the universally buffoonish men in the movie. For most other emotions, she did not get them across to me, I'm sorry to say, since I've liked her in the past, as in 'Year of the Dog'. I wish I had liked it better, but instead I kept wishing it would just end.

Historical, romantic-comedy film Wild Nights with Emily directed and written by Madeleine Olnek stars Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson, a historically famous poet, and Amy Seimetz as Susan Ziegler, Emily's friend and lover. The film dedicates it's one and a half hour runtime to exploring the flipping, romantic relationship between Emily and Susan throughout their years alongside an external narration given by editor Mabel Todd. Though the film is listed as a comedy, it falls short in many instances in which it attempts to be humorous, with the joke either being drawn out too long or with little build up besides relying on tropes, such as when Judge Otis falls asleep during his literature conversation with Emily. From the first instance we meet him, his initial character is dominated solely by comical cliches; he fails to remember things well and accurately hear what Emily says to him, leading her to speak louder and constantly ensure he is paying attention to her. The scene feels drawn out far too long for a joke without any other context, and such awkward lengths during comical moments can be seen throughout the movie that just don't land as well as hoped. However, with that being said, the film does have instances of shorter, punctual jokes that do give rise to humor, such as when Austin asks his father if there is mail for him when Emily receives her letters only to be promptly shut down with a simple and sharp "No" before he leaves the scene. A majority of the film's comical strength tends to come from these sorts of jokes, but unfortunately, they are few and far between other stilted attempts. That note brings me to my current question: why a romantic comedy? The flat comedy beside, the aspect of painting the relationship between Emily and Susan with comical moments (many of which are not even between the two women but between them and a secondary character) feels sort of bizarre considering the heartfelt, tender content of the real poems from Emily to Susan. In fact, I would argue that the moments of sincerity between Emily and Susan act as the main point of the movie, rather than the humorous. I found myself wanting to see more of their relationship, especially in their youth, so that their falling out as adults would strike an emotional chord much harder and make me feel for these two women and characters. The scene of both Emily and Susan walking through the woods was especially well done, in my opinion, as the juxtaposing colors between Emily (wearing black) and Susan (wearing orange, like the autumn environment around her) paints and foreshadows the space between the two women-how Emily differs from the norm while Susan adheres to it. I'd love if more of that concept was explored in the context of their relationship, since I feel as though Emily Dickinson's feelings towards Susan Ziegler are less discussed and acknowledged compared to the entirety of her poetic career. With that being said, it's a bit disappointing that their relationship was not developed in the film, as that aspect seemed to share the efforts put into writing the comedy and timeline-the timeline of the movie, specifically, seems to jump wildly between Mabel's narration to the crowd versus teenager Emily and Susan as well as adult Emily and Susan. It made the sequence of events more complex than I feel it needed to be, and makes me wonder what the reasoning behind including Mabel's narration was. If anything, Mabel's narration took away from the immersion of following Emily and Susan through their life. Overall, Wild Nights with Emily does give audiences a glimpse into the secret and silenced relationship between Emily Dickison and Susan Ziegler. I feel as though the film was trying to tackle the challenging ordeal of Emily Dickison as both lover and poet alongside tones that didn't unite the story as well as intended. There was a lot of potential, but sadly the execution was not at the same level.

This movie, for all the potential of everyone on screen, fails. It fails on so many fronts: the makeup looks patchy in HD; the hair styles vary wildly between decades; acting choices, regardless of the tone of the story, are made of big swings and many big misses; green screen scenes are obvious and distracting; the sound editing is all over the place; set dressings are sloppy - Drapes are un-ironed, pictures frames are cheap, etc. Etc. Molly Shannon is the only thing that holding this film together. Every moment of her performance is authentic and sincere. If not for her, this low-budget film would be a total disaster. And perhaps that's what's really missing - money. It's not just that everything on screen reads as cheap, it's that the cheapness doesn't translate as indie, it reads as if the movie was barely scraping by.

I'm not a fan of Dickinson's work but didn't know much about her life and wanted to find out more than I knew about her..... recluse and had a few poems published in her lifetime, the rest came after her death. We are told there are nearly 2,000 but as most of these are about four lines, of course she's seen as prolific! The film's opening scene is ridiculous and seemingly from a comedy sketch - the two ladies in Victorian apparel getting stuck into each other; kissing which leads to more. Apparently Emily was a lesbian. Interpretations of her poems and letters tells someone this and suddenly she is lauded as such. At least there were letters, unlike poor Mary Anning who simply because she had a friendship with lady, was suddenly a lesbian in the awful film 'Ammonite'. Instead of concentrating on her achievements, we have her frolicking with her lady friend. Anyway, back to Emily's film. We then have a some very poor acting, some over acting and some plain bad acting. We have Emily and Susan snogging each other at every opportunity, and having relations when they can - even twenty years down the line. In the film poor Emily transforms from an attractive young woman to plain old hag (but she died at 55!). The actress playing old Emily has the most odd facial expressions at attempting humour There seems to be no authenticity to the film. The actresses have no look about them of the Victorian period, modern make up and thinly plucked eyebrows and modern hairstyles. The dialogue is modern too. Very odd. The film implies that Emily preyed on single women - a friend 'Kate' suddenly leaves the house, half dressed. It seems Emily was responsible! The scene with the old Judge talking to Emily of The Brontes work and mixing up all books was pretty daft and made a mockery of the wonderful Brontes, whose work is much more popular and well known than Emily's. The film ends with claims of 'evidence' of Emily's relationships with Susan and the woman named Kate. It also states there is a myth about Emily being a half cracked recluse- this is exactly how the film portrays her A dreadful film - attempting humour and failing.

Good story line, fine performances, could have been better if left to a set of better directorial hands.

Horribly cast, awfully written, with amateurish camerawork and blatant historical inaccuracies. I've seen zero-budget student films that had more impressive production, acting, and directing.

"Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me." Emily Dickinson Most cultural historians had pegged Emily Dickinson (Molly Shannon) as about dead long before her time when they depicted her to be shy, reclusive, and virginal. Recent scholarship, upon viewing letters from her to sister-in-law Susan (Susan Zieglar) shows a secret passionate love between the two. Hurray for those of us who suspected that poetic soul had more than death on her mind. Director/writer Madeleine Olnik bouncily constructs the story with different episodes, some flash backs, to give it the feel, as one critic puts it, of a "Victorian vaudeville." Yes, it has some stock characters, almost winking eyes breaking the wall, and laughable social conventions. More than that, however, it has the roguish tone of a character who is brainy but not above unconventional high-jinx in the love category. Happily, some of Emily's prose and poetry is run across the screen at appropriate times in the jagged sequence of mildly torrid scenes. In a sense, these are as minimalist like Emily's poetry, suggesting much more than the shots reveal. So be it. A poet suggests and does not report. Although Wild Nights with Emily is titillatingly titled, the film itself is a rather mild exposition of a similarly mild poet, on the outside, mind you. For us English majors, it's nectar; for the rest, it's entertaining vaudeville. "Dying is a wild night and a new road." Dickinson

I have been reading and studying Emily Dickinson since a child, now 68. Including her letters to Susan. Including a beautiful magazine article about 10 yrs ago wherein they described how she wasn't the recluse she is always made out to be. That she had a large, enclosed garden conservatory where she had many people visit, especially children. I was saddened by this film's approach, believing it to be more marketable than true portrayal. I turned it off after 45 minutes. I gave it 2 stars because in spite of the story it had good production values.