A Qui­et Passion

A qui­et pas­sion trick­les through Ter­ence Davies’ eighth fea­ture, start­ing with the title, form­ing a trib­u­tary around a char­ac­ter, then pool­ing in the film’s cen­tre, which is poet­ry itself. When John Good­man screamed, ​“I’ll show you the life of the mind!” in the Coen broth­ers’ 1991 film, Bar­ton Fink, they could have been ges­tic­u­lat­ing towards a vol­ume by Emi­ly Dickinson.

In this flighty biopic, the life of the over­looked-in-her-time 19^th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can poet is drawn from six biogra­phies and an exam­i­na­tion of her own words. It shows what a life looks like when a sen­si­tive genius places reflec­tions on exis­tence ahead of exis­tence itself. Strengths lie in this film’s com­mit­ment to under­stand­ing an extra­or­di­nary, reclu­sive woman, its weak­ness­es in a dogged fideli­ty to relay­ing the small events of each pass­ing year.

Had the film offered an atmos­pher­ic and impres­sion­is­tic slice of life, in the vein of Davies’ best film, 1992’s The Long Day Clos­es, it would have been even more potent. To an extent, this is auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Davies often laments his lack of phys­i­cal beau­ty. Despite being played by Cyn­thia Nixon, who radi­ates a pale fire, this Emi­ly Dick­in­son is too self-dep­re­cat­ing to con­ceive of romance. She will not appear before a young male admir­er, con­vinced that her looks would both repel him and shat­ter his attach­ment to her poetry.

This char­ac­ter log­ic is not estab­lished in order to be over­come by a dash­ing hero in the third act. It is the stub­born con­vic­tion of a woman rec­on­ciled to focus­ing only on the page and family.

We begin by watch­ing her pre­co­cious teen grad­u­at­ing from an acad­e­my (young Dick­in­son is played by Emma Bell). So begins a tus­sle to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as a female poet as the years roll by until her untime­ly death aged 55 from kid­ney dis­ease. How to cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly ren­der a life lived in the invis­i­ble space of men­tal wran­gling? Any­one look­ing for action rather than con­ver­sa­tion may want to apply else­where. A perky, para­sol-twirling new­com­er to the vil­lage con­sti­tutes an event, and the rest is mile­stones of time: sick­ness, death, the mar­riage of a sibling.

Dick­in­son is a life­long spec­ta­tor, but Nixon imbues her with pathos via an exquis­ite­ly pained sen­si­tiv­i­ty. Her broth­er Austin’s infi­deli­ty hits her hard, not because of busy­body out­rage, but because of pas­sion­ate prin­ci­ples. She bold­ly chal­lenges the reli­gious norms of her house­hold, but her soul remains her work sta­tion, and she holds loved ones to its pun­ish­ing standards.

As Dickinson’s world is small, Davies makes sure that we occu­py it ful­ly along­side her. The detailed inti­ma­cy with which the inte­ri­ors of her life­long home are ren­dered makes the set feel almost the­atri­cal. The best moments of the film are when Nixon reads Dickinson’s poet­ry – Davies hav­ing con­trived a con­text. ​‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’ is read joy­ful­ly to a baby, but usu­al­ly the poems are nar­ra­tions over qui­et scenes. Either way, her inflec­tions match the beats and mean­ing of the words, and we see how Dick­in­son fleet­ing­ly ascends from the con­fines of life into the divin­i­ty of poetry.