A Quiet Passion: A lyrical and transcendent film about Emily Dickinson

A good friend has never forgiven me after he went to see a couple of movies I had recommended. I had characterized the films as achingly lyrical and beautifully transcendent — granted, not the most precise of critical terms — but when he saw American Beauty and Like Water for Chocolate, he felt betrayed by my gush!

So I hesitate now to recommend A Quiet Passion on the basis of its lyrical transcendence, but that is exactly what you get with this sublime film.

Director/Writer Terence Davies (The House of Mirth, Sunset Song, Of Time and the City), Fellow of the British Film Institute, has turned to this 19th-century American poet to create a memorable biopic of Emily Dickinson’s life and times. It is a self-contained family, suffocatingly patriarchal and pious: Mother (Joanna Bacon), father (Keith Carradine), brother Austin (Duncan Duff), younger sister Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle), good friend Miss Buffam (Catherine Bailey), and other stuffy aunts, smarmy suitors and oily ministers. Davies shot the interiors in a Belgium studio, but the exteriors were filmed in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the Dickinson properties, now a museum-cum-shrine to all the Emily Dickinson fans on the pilgrimage route.

From opening frame to closing shot, through every tracking and panning sequence, from the first spoken word to the last, whether dialogue or voiceover poem, from each sound effect and piece of music, you are transported to the 19th century of Emily Dickinson. She is a devoted daughter and sister, though never a wife, loyal friend, budding agnostic (if not atheist), feminist, abolitionist and pacifist (though apolitical), sufferer under patriarchy and orthodoxy, idiosyncratic poet (with unappreciated punctuation and misunderstood line breaks), acerbic wit, harsh critic (mostly of herself), penetrating intellectual, hermetic recluse, obsessive letter writer, melancholic (if not depressive), likely epileptic, maker of hand-sewn miniature chapbooks for her poetry (slipped into visitors' pockets), and essentially unknown and certainly unheralded in her lifetime.

Dickinson may once have written “I’m nobody. Who are you?” but this film gives lie to that self-denigration. She, just as her contemporary Walt Whitman (whom she never met) described himself, contains multitudes.

Emily Dickinson, as depicted on the screen by the triumphant Cynthia Nixon (Broadway: The Philadelphia Story, The Real Thing, Hurlyburly, Indiscretions, Wit; Screen: Sex and the City, Warm Springs, Rabbit Hole), is a brilliant revelation, a marvel of steeliness and sublimity. Nixon embodies what we think we know about this unknowable, inscrutable nonconformist poet, now considered among the finest poetic voices that this nation has produced.

This actor is a master of conveying Dickinson’s tiny gestures with a pen, a sewing needle, a mere turn of the head or arch of a brow, but can also lash and eviscerate many fools gladly. That Dickinson was virtually unknown in her lifetime, and that she lived and wrote her entire life within five square miles around Amherst (mostly as viewed from her bedroom window), makes it all the more unbelievable that she writes with such power and authority about existential themes, immortality, bravery, identity, family, death, nature, living in the now and complacent about the later, all with total disregard for what was acceptable and appropriate. Nixon exquisitely channels Dickinson’s wit and bite, her unfettered feelings — at least on paper, and her efforts to understand those feelings that cannot be expressed. Rarely have a writer’s struggles been better conveyed in that writer’s face, as if her interior being were writ large with her eyes and mouth alone. 

Dickinson advises us the tell the truth, but tell it slant, and Davies's screenplay and direction combined with Nixon's performance provides a mesmerizing truth about this poet and her poems.  There’s strength and vulnerability in Nixon’s performance, just as in Dickinson’s poetry. 

We know about Dickinson's life, her family and friends, from her voluminous letters in the Harvard and Amherst archives. But as director Terence Davies is more interested in what he sees as “narrative truth” rather than exact biographical integrity — a slant, if you will — he conflates real characters, eliminates some, invents others. The great Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her de facto editor and publisher (and suspected by scholars to be the great love interest of her life) is nonexistent in this movie. Instead, Davies chooses to focus on the lyrical transcendence — there’s my gloating, glowing phrase again — of her words, her images, her preoccupations and her survival in a society that dismisses women and their independent thoughts, equates religious piety with morality and demands allegiance to propriety.

A word or two about the visual and aural style of this film. Remember we are in the 19th century. There is no electric light. There is no recorded sound. There are no entertainment devices beyond books and live opera and hymns at the piano. Life is slower. Conversation is more formal, structured, aphoristic and epigrammatic, even. Clothing is bulkier, starchier, tighter. Interior decoration is horse-haired and with heavy, dark folds. Photography requires sitting perfectly still and never, ever  smiling. On the surface, it’s unrelentingly grim and severe and symmetrical. But then comes Dickinson’s poetry that supplies astringency and ambiguity, precision and paradox to enliven these restrained, inhibited times.

This milieu is conveyed exquisitely in one wonderful 360-degree shot as the camera scans the room and we see the entire family of father, mother, son and two daughters, reading, knitting, sleeping, staring and thinking, all in a long, slow, wordless pan. The clock ticks. The clock chimes. As the family ages, and we come closer to the time frame of the familiar Emily Dickinson portrait — severe demeanor, tight bun, unsmiling face and black ribbon with cameo at her throat — the cinematographer uses historic daguerrotypes, one dissolving to the next. Languid tracking shots evoke the period's slower pace. Interior sets are lit from fireplaces, candlelight, kerosene lamps, with shafts of sunlight filled with motes of dust slanting into the rooms. Amherst gardens are lush, fecund, sun-drenched.

Director of Photography is Florian Hoffmeister (House of Saddam, The Deep Blue Sea); production designer is Merijn Sep (Parade’s End, The Missing).

There is stillness. Sounds seem magnified because there is so little to be heard in this quiet time and place, beyond crickets, clocks, footsteps, doors, birdsong, snapping fans, pouring water, glass pitcher against glass cup, the scratch of nib against paper and the clomp of horses and lowing of cattle. And talk. Talk. Talk. And lest we forget, its being the 19th century means we must encounter both the brutal reality of the Civil War and the horror of insidious diseases without modern medicine. The camera does not blink from either.

At first glance this seems such a small, quiet film, subdued and sedate, more interior than exterior. The title itself contains a mutually exclusive opposition of quiet and passion. But just as Walt Whitman proudly claimed his own self contradiction, the poet Emily Dickinson and this film A Quiet Passion are rich and full and contradictory.

It contains multitudes.

This article appears in May 18-25, 2017.