I’m a nut for Emily Dickinson. I appreciate director Terence Davies’s slow and brooding English dramas. I even liked Cynthia Nixon in Sex and the City. (Who didn’t? She was the only one to like!) But holy shit, this movie, A Quiet Passion (which opens tomorrow), couldn’t hold my attention if they played it back at double speed.
Nixon’s portrayal of Dickinson as a warm-hearted, sharp-tongued, outwardly feminist abolitionist artist makes her a liberal hero for our times, but she also delivers all her lines with a dim person’s wide smile and a creepy clown’s slow cadence, which extinguishes all her righteous fire.
While Davies carefully avoids the ahistorical but popular characterization of Dickinson as a mousy shut-in, he doesn’t avoid the cliches that attend all biopics of famous writers.
If you do not know those cliches, I will list them. There are only two, but they are powerfully bad: 1) Scene where writer furiously scribbles out a poem and then reads the perfect first draft to a sunbeam; 2) Scene where the writer reads her poem over a montage of some politically relevant material. In Dickinson’s case, a poem is read over images of flapping Confederate and Union flags.
We are talking about EMILY DICKINSON for fuck’s sake. The father and mother of American poetry. (Walt Whitman is the aunt of American poetry.) The qualities that make her poems eternal—the multivalent meanings of words, the sound symbolism of her rhymes, the true and private struggle she endures with the Christian god (and not just with those who don’t represent him in nuanced ways)—are nowhere to be found in this film.
Skip the movie, and spend an hour reading her poems instead. Are you looking for suggestions? I’m so glad. I’m here to help. Her poems are only numbered: 10. 17. 126. 135. 335. 443. 479. 601. 620. 622. 1715.
