I thought the new Emily Dickinson biopic was going to be a simple thing to watch and review. I wasn't expecting a miracle, merely a competent portrayal by Cynthia Nixon with perhaps some extravagant flourishes in tribute to our great mystic poet. How naive I have become. I assumed Emily's genius was no longer controversial, that we'd gotten past embarrassment at a woman who wanted to be left alone to write, who was not devastated by her father's death but rather liberated from the domestic slavery of his care. It seems most men are unwilling to contemplate their own superfluity, director Terence Davies is such a man, and I am forced to wish his film A Quiet Passion a quiet death, starting Friday at Opera Plaza.
To say A Quiet Passion lasts two hours is to give the reader no clue as to the mind-numbing parade of disconnected scenes that stretches from school years through indistinguishable family sit-downs and walk-abouts and posings spliced back-to-back with no perceptible evolution except changes in facial hair, principally the men's. There's one brilliant moment in a photographer's studio, when Keith Carradine as the father morphs into an older version of himself, and the younger actors playing his three children morph into their older counterparts. Maybe I was simply eager to be done with Young Emily by minute 20.
Too bad the mature versions Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, and Duncan Duff are too old for their parts and implausible as siblings. Why were they cast? Nixon has an unfortunate habit of never quite closing her mouth, and I found myself fixating on her teeth with something approaching dread. Duff has a distractingly weak mouth, and his hairpiece is fussily fluffy and feathered like an aging rock star's. Ehle repeatedly strains her smile to the breaking point in a manner contradicting any claim to warmth. I doubt I would've been so bored as to obsess about these things had the script worked.
If there were a script. In this pretentious omnibus, scenes are set up like dominos too far spaced to engage their successors in chain reaction. Some vignettes are mercifully miserly of speech, but in the film's distended midsection actors spit out non sequitor aphorisms in a hideous parody of wit. Cruel irony that cut-and-paste compilation passes for hommage to our supreme stylist of ambiguous concision. Davies' travesty of chattering domesticity denies Dickinson's communion with birdsong and frog ribbit, not to mention her expert gardening, belittling the seclusion necessary to her poetry, while ignoring the depths of her love for women.
Davies' direction of his own bloated script gives new meaning to the word self-indulgent, as scenes slide onward without hindrance of suspense or cause and effect. He makes it clear at the beginning that this is 19th-century New England and therefore dour, that the family is well-to-do yet freethinking, that people back then moved and thought differently than we. So far, so good. Once he's established these ground rules, however, he goes off the rails with wildly approximate renderings of events in defiance of both emotional truth and historical record.
Worst of all, he makes Emily coy verging on moronic, with a perpetually sappy grin. There's no cool, mordant, eye-of-god New England genius here, only homespun middlebrow nursery rhymes. What use and abuse he makes of Emily's poetry and letters! Well-known bits pop up in dialogue, and whole swaths are intoned in a singsong voiceover that timidly respects formal structure while stopping dead any flight into ecstasy. Davies all but destroys Dickinson's legacy, dignity, and art. Best read her poems in a room of your own and leave this dead pigeon to rot.
In 1976, Adrienne Rich, poet and radical feminist, wrote an essay on Emily entitled "Vesuvius at Home," which you can read at Parnassus Review online. The title gives the measure of Emily's gift: the context might be domestic, but the message is loud, scary, and soul-shattering. Rich liberates Emily-the-genius from all the condescending judgments that had encrusted themselves to Emily-the-spinster from the misogynist tradition. Forty years on, Davies has slathered them all over her again, in an act of vandalism that has been praised by the patriarchal papers. Sisters, take nothing for granted. Ever.