New England in the mid-19th century was a literary hothouse, overgrown with wild and exotic talents. That Emily Dickinson
was among the most dazzling of these is not disputable, but to say that
she was obscure in her own time would exaggerate her celebrity. A
handful of her poems appeared in print while she was alive (she died in
1886, at 55), but she preferred private rituals of publication,
carefully writing out her verses and sewing them into booklets.
Though
she had no interest in fame, Dickinson was anything but an amateur
scribbler, approaching her craft with unstinting discipline and tackling
mighty themes of death, time and eternity. She remains a paradoxical
writer: vividly present on the page but at the same time persistently
elusive. The more familiar you are with her work, the stranger she
becomes.
An
admirer can be forgiven for approaching “A Quiet Passion,” Terence
Davies’s new movie about Dickinson’s life, with trepidation. The
literalness of film and the creaky conventions of the biopic threaten to
dissolve that strangeness, to domesticate genius into likable
quirkiness. But Mr. Davies,
whose work often blends public history and private memory, possesses a
poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep,
idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.
Trailer: ‘A Quiet Passion’
A preview of the film.
By MUSIC BOX FILMS on Publish Date April 11, 2017.
Image courtesy of Internet Video Archive.
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To Dickinson — played in the long afternoon of her adult life by Cynthia Nixon
— the enemy of poetry is obviousness. (It is a vice she finds
particularly obnoxious in the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the
reigning poet of the age.) “A Quiet Passion” refuses the obvious at
every turn. The romantically disappointed recluse of “The Belle of Amherst,”
William Luce’s sturdy, sentimental play, has been replaced by a
prickly, funny, freethinking intellectual, whose life is less a
chronicle of withdrawal from the world than a series of explosive
engagements with the universe. The passion is not so quiet, really.
Dickinson muses and ponders, yes, but she also seethes, scolds, teases
and bursts out laughing.
Continue reading the main story
Solitude
is part of Dickinson’s birthright — the taste for it links her to Henry
David Thoreau, another odd duck plying the waters of Massachusetts —
but so are social and familial ties. The first time we see young Emily
(played by Emma Bell) she is about to be kicked out of Mount Holyoke
College, branded a “no-hoper” for her heterodox religious views. The
description is wrong, of course. (“Hope is the thing with feathers,” she
would write.) Her skepticism about God was more personal than
metaphysical. She didn’t doubt his existence so much as question his
intentions.
In
tracing the flowering of her vocation, Mr. Davies pays scrupulous
attention to the milieu that fed it. Her formal education complete,
Dickinson returns to Amherst to live with her parents (Keith Carradine
and Joanna Bacon); her brother, Austin (Duncan Duff); and her sister,
Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle). On the way, there is a trip to a concert with an
uptight aunt who is disgusted by the spectacle of a woman singing and
disdainful of music in general. What about hymns?, her niece asks.
“Hymns are not music.”
But
the Protestant hymnal was the metrical trellis on which Dickinson
wreathed blossoms and thorns of musical invention. “A Quiet Passion”
suggests that the mixture of austerity and extravagance in her verse was
shaped partly by an environment in which religious severity coexisted
with aesthetic and intellectual experimentation. (That aunt may have
disapproved of the performance, but she still went.)
This
is a visually gorgeous film — full of sunlight and flowers, symmetry
and ornament — that also feels refreshingly plain. The smooth, almost
lyrical movement of the camera conveys lightness and gravity, much in
the way that some of Dickinson’s poems do. Like her voice, it seems to
have been set loose in time, to rush forward or to linger as the meaning
and the meter require, to turn time itself into a series of riddles.
The movie lasts for two hours, or 37 years, or the difference between
now and forever, or the span of an idea.
It
is dominated by a single voice: Ms. Nixon’s, reciting stanzas instead
of voice-over narration and cracking impish, sometimes impious jokes
with the marvelous Ms. Ehle. A novel of family life writes itself
between the lines, full of memorable characters and dramatic scenes.
Parents grow old and die. Austin marries and then has an affair, a
transgression that enrages Emily. She and Vinnie seem to exist in
precise, kinetic counterpoint, like the left and right hands of a piano
étude.
Not
everything is harmony. If one of the film’s threads is the existential
conundrum that most directly informs Dickinson’s poetry — what it is
like to live from moment to moment with the knowledge of eternity —
another is the dialectic of freedom and authority that defined her life.
Ms. Nixon’s Dickinson is a natural feminist, but she also naturally
submits, as her siblings do, to their father’s will. When she wants to
write late at night, she asks his permission, noting later that no
husband would have granted it. She is submissive and rebellious in ways
that defy easy summary. Like the other great American poet of her century, Walt Whitman, she contradicts herself.
And
though “A Quiet Passion” is small — modest in scope, inward rather than
expansive, precise in word and gesture — it contains multitudes. It
opens a window into an era whose political and moral legacies are still
with us, and illuminates, with a practiced portraitist’s sureness of
touch, the mind of someone who lived completely in her time, knowing all
the while that she would eventually escape it.
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