“A Quiet Passion” is a brilliant chronicling of a life lived quietly, one that is sweeping in its emotional depth rather than its narrative scope. The film is poetic in nature, precise in word and gesture, and reveals a rich inner life of poet Emily Dickinson who lived much of hers in her head and home.
4.5/5 STARS
Director Terence Davies encompasses the paradoxical and exasperating life of poet Emily Dickinson, played by Cynthia Nixon, in a biopic focused more on the poet’s defiant, engaging nature with the world rather than her reclusiveness.
Dickinson was, as most may already know, a recluse for most of her life. Only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime, most of them anonymously and usually with edits she did not agree with. Her literary esteem came posthumously once more of her poems were published, this time with her name attached.
Whether Dickinson was actually funny or not, I don’t know, but Davies managed to write a script full of sardonic, cutting wit that makes the audience laugh more times than expected as Dickinson slays her siblings and peers in exposing their hypocritical sanctimony.
However, it is no doubt Dickinson was clever, as Nixon portrays her with a lack of compromise in how she lived her life. The opening scene establishes this defiance as a younger Dickinson (Emma Bell) stood up to a sister at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, while her peers stand off to the side as she articulates her own belief of how to live a respectable life in the eyes of God. This defiance stays with Dickinson throughout her life, and her headstrong outbursts causing headaches and fights within her family time and time again.
Throughout the movie, Nixon’s Dickinson openly questions the forces holding her back, constantly fights with others over moral issues and holds a contradictory yet self-sabotaging nature towards suitors. And in a society that teemed with sexism, she is involved in fundamental disagreements with religious elders and conflicting signals from her father (Keith Carradine) about when to roll with tradition and when to speak her mind.
These forces battle inside Dickinson as she longs for literary recognition and is cruelly mocked by men who view her poetry as morose and sappy. “A Quiet Passion” best highlights this struggle to prevail in a hostile world as the clock ticks loudly above her, regardless of whether this perceived hostility was warranted or not, as her family would liked to have claimed.
There is a moment early in the film in which each member of the family sits for a daguerreotype, and as the camera slowly encroaches, their faces morph from the actors playing the young Dickinson children into Nixon, Jennifer Ehle playing her sister Vinnie and Duncan Duff as her brother Austin.
This gradual passage of time is present throughout the film, not through montage scenes, but through the death of Dickinson’s father, then her mother and finally through Dickinson herself, as her brother and sister nurse her through the illness that plagued her final years. Davies never shows Dickinson furtively hunched over her desk writing, or even the image of paper scraps scrawled with poems taking over her room. Instead, the film depicts what most likely inspired Dickinson’s poetry as Nixon recites passages of her work in voice-overs.
The cloistered feel of a period biopic taking place nearly entirely in the Dickinson estate might feel stiff and sedated, but it magnified the emotions that the actors captured so well. Dickinson’s passion was not as quiet as the title makes it out to be.
Viewers come to see Dickinson as an unflinching, persistent woman unwilling to take her place in a patriarchal society. Davies succeeded in making viewers ache as they count the years going by with Dickinson, hoping the film divulges from the factual storyline to see Nixon’s character succeed in some capacity.
Ultimately, Davies successfully crafted a rich view of a private woman, avoiding the stuffiness the biopic’s description gives trepidation of.