A Quiet Passion

seen on 4 May 2017

Terence Davies directs Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson, Jennifer Ehle as her sister Vinny, Keith Carradine as her father Edward, Joanna Bacon as her mother (also Emily) and Duncan Duff as her brother Austin in an extraordinarily intense film about the poet's life; Davies also wrote the screenplay. 

Emily Dickinson was famously reclusive and unconventional in the eyes of 19th century Boston society - her steeliness is shown in the first scene when she does not move to the right of her headmistress amongst those who have accepted Jesus, nor to the left with those who hope to; she is then castigated as a 'no-hoper' and her father and siblings soon arrive to bring her home. After that, the film barely moves from the house where she spent the rest of her life writing and, increasingly, refusing to meet visitors. 

In the wrong hands this could be very unpromising material for a film, but Davies has created an intense screenplay, often using Dickinson's own poems in voiceover, and his cast, especially Cynthia Nixon, have responded with luminous performances, investing even the most antiquated conversational styles with forcefulness and conviction. Some of the interchanges are reminiscent of barbed social comedy, but the cost of such genteel raillery for an independent-minded woman with a strict but beloved father, an idolised but eventually flawed brother, and an increasingly bitter lack of self-esteem, is very high. The occasional outbursts of anger and self-deprecation are all the more startling and painful for arising out of such a measured, comfortable and privileged existence - such an existence is all very well, but it can be at times appallingly stifling, and Emily is constantly aware of the disadvantages an unmarried daughter of the house must suffer, particularly when she has concluded that marriage is extremely unlikely for her. The double standards are painfully clear when she discovers her brother using the house she lives in for assignations with a mistress (he lives next door) but is unable to convince him how shoddily he is behaving.

The scenes are beautifully shot, with light falling through windows onto silhouetted figures (reminiscent of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi) or else in the garden evoking the beauties and langours of the New England seasons. The quiet attention to details of the period - dress and manners - and the intense but wonderfully self-possessed performances mean that episodes that are almost dreamlike in intensity can successfully be integrated into the daily round of entertaining, family disagreement or gossip, and the gradual sickening as the older generation passes and Emily becomes a victim of Bright's disease (horribly portrayed in its effects amidst all the decorum) is all the more effective for being grounded in such an atmosphere.

It's a remarkable film of a remarkable life.