A Quiet Passion

Terence Davies’ biopic of Emily Dickinson is so uninterested in the typical moving and shaking that biopics do that the film, A Quiet Passion, plays more like Grey Gardens than Ghandi. A Davies film moves from moments of ecstasy to crescendos of turbulence, his characters often suffering quietly, inwardly, stoically.

Thus Davies, an Englishman, sees Dickinson as fitting within the pantheon of his prior, more continental, characters. The finest poet America ever produced, Dickinson remains the quintessential unappreciated-in-her-time artist. The overlooked genius is a trope Davies, who also wrote the screenplay, delights in without it feeling like a trope. Rather, the film regards the under-appreciation of its subject as just another unhappy fact of a largely unhappy life.

On Davies view, Dickinson’s unhappiness is punctuated by moments of blissful wit and familial camaraderie. We open on a young Dickinson (Emma Bell) at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where the poet was educated. An iconoclast from the start, the young Dickinson refuses to submit to cheap religious sentiment. Davies films the classroom exercise, which quickly becomes an inquisition, from fixed positions, emphasizing the austerity and coldness of the world Dickinson inhabits, one of rigid orthodoxies and conformity.

The themes of Dickinson’s poetry don’t interest Davies as much as the music of it, the way her careful meter lands as deadpan revelation to the ear. Cynthia Nixon plays the poet for the bulk of the film, supplying voiceover in verse. Nixon’s wry, ecstatic performance recalls, in an odd sense, Denis Levant in Holy Motors — screen acting gives way to the purpose of the film itself, the lead actor not so much acting out the realities within the film but exploring its environs as one might explore the street corners and back alleys of a Matrix-like computer simulation.

Nixon’s grand performance mixes well with those of her fellow actors. Two in particular stand out, the great Jennifer Ehle (who plays Dickinson’s beloved sister Lavinia) and Catherine Bailey (who is impressive as Vryling Wilder Buffam, a devilsih family friend). These performances are a parade of witty banter. No one could be this relentlessly clever, but the overkill fits: one imagines that if Dickinson and her small circle of confidants did not behave this way, they likely perceived themselves as behaving this way.

Davies chooses to perceive Dickinson’s unrivaled intellect through her capacity for irony and good-old American sass. We know little about what is was like to be around Dickinson, but Davies makes excellent educated guesses — his poet always speaks her barbs with a smirk, polite but sticks up for herself, opinionated yet tolerant.

The humor is counterbalanced with deep malaise. Dickinson’s mother (Joanna Bacon) suffered depression, which eventually trickles down to her daughter. The second half of “A Quiet Passion” is masterful in its poise and formal slickness (Davies is one of those older filmmakers who just knows when to move the camera and when to chill out). But there are times where the film slips into biographical fact litany — we must get the scene in which Dickinson refuses to greet visitors; we must get the scene in which she complains about an editor monkeying with her atypical punctuation. Likewise certain uses of poems are obvious. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” gets deployed precisely when one would expect.

Davies’ last three films, The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song, and now A Quiet Passion constitute as substantial a trilogy as any living filmmaker has put together. At age 71, he seems as undeniably a genius as his current film’s subject.

A Quiet Passion — FOUR STARS

Directed by Terence Davies. Rated PG-13. Hurricane Films. Gibson & MacLeod Indomitable Entertainment. WeatherVane Productions. Potemkino. Music Box Films. 125 min.