The film leads us through four decades of life in the clever and insular Dickinson family.
By all rights, a movie about Emily Dickinson, starring Cynthia Nixon of Sex and the City and given the dreadful title A Quiet Passion, should be intensely boring: a poet, hoop skirts, dark rooms, a lifelong supporting actress in a starring role — it all reeks of Hallmark made-for-TV movies.
Fortunately, writer and director Terence Davies avoids all the pitfalls, delivering a strange and beautiful film about an American genius.
Davies leads us through four decades of life in the insular and clever Dickinson family as Emily grows increasingly reclusive. And even as the setting becomes more confined, Davies’ vibrant camerawork never makes this tiny world claustrophobic. It helps that he is working with Nixon, whose every glance and twitch is an adventure.
The magnificence of Nixon’s performance cannot be overstated. Like Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln, she humanizes an icon while simultaneously bolstering the legend. She portrays a woman balanced between humility and pride, humor and doubt. Dickinson is no delicate flower, but rather a knife, sharp and subtle.
Nixon’s greatest trick is her command of Davies’ baroque script. He says he directed his cast to act without being mannered, and yet the script is so mannered that this direction makes for some jarring contrasts between the lines and the delivery. Most of the actors — particularly the very Californian Keith Carradine playing the family patriarch — have to contort themselves to deliver the words. But Nixon wears the words like a perfectly tailored dress.
When introducing the film before it screened at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival, Davies lamented, “There’s nothing worse than biopics about people who are great. They just sit around looking glum for two hours. There’s nothing worse than being solemn.” For the most part he avoids these traps. The film is sad, yes, but not glum. Quiet, of course (it’s in the title), but not solemn. And it is surprisingly funny. There is plenty of laugh-out-loud humor, sometimes playing like a lost Oscar Wilde script, other times like literary vaudeville.
If the real-life Dickinsons actually talked so precisely, it is no surprise that literary genius would spring from this fountain. But, for all their polished words, their silence is what makes the portrayal of the family believable. Behind every conversation, there are full dialogues composed of glances.The family is a solid bloc of protection and comfort, as Davies demonstrates with a 360-degree pan of the parlor as they go about their evening routine, at ease with each other. It is rare for a film to capture such family unity.
The spectre of death hangs low over the film. Sometimes death strikes suddenly, sometimes it drags on, but it always arrives too soon. And with the loss of each Dickinson, the family’s connections become more fragile.
But death cannot squelch the vibrancy of A Quiet Passion, a movie that follows Emily Dickinson’s instructions to “Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”