A Quiet Passion review: underneath the parasol-twirling, there's a great Emily Dickinson biopic struggling to get out
Dir: Terence Davies. Cast: Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Duncan Duff, Keith Carradine, Jodhi May, Joanna Bacon, Annette Badland, Catherine Bailey. 12A cert, 125 mins
“Rigour is no substitute for happiness,” declares a weeping Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) to her sister-in-law in A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies’ taxing film about the sad, thwarted life of an artist. It’s an exchange that lays out the film’s themes robustly, and ought to be devastating. But alas, too much else is tonally askew in this twittering literary portrait for it to have the emotional – or even intellectual – clout intended.
The affinity Davies evidently feels for his subject – a self-denying, self-doubting chronicler of the heart who devoted herself sacrificially to the creative life – is as hard to miss as it is important to root for. His film is achingly sensitive in all departments, not least in Nixon’s quiveringly intense bluestocking workout. But it aches too loudly.
Beneath the reams of verbiage and parasol-twirling garden talk, there’s a severe and luminous biopic – one with, well, a rigour to match its suppressed passion – struggling to get out. The film’s early scenes play up the conflict between a young Dickinson (a fine Emma Bell) and her religious schooling, and the friction, too, with her starchily demanding father (a very whiskery Keith Carradine), who permits her to compose her poems by candelight, while the rest of their Massachusetts household doze.
They have a dreadful aunt, played with over-pious pomposity by Annette Badland, whose own bad poetry Emily and her siblings damn with faint praise: when she departs huffily in a carriage, they snigger and smirk, and it’s hard to say who you’d rather be rid of. But then arrives Emily’s soon-to-be-bosom-buddy Vryling Buffum (Catherine Bailey) and the entire film has a new nemesis. Her every epigram hangs bafflingly in the air, floating the idea of wit without the wit. Try: “Never play happy music at a wedding, Emily. It’s too misleading!”. Forced smiles all round – and that’s one of her better efforts.
This character, despite gaining Davies far less mileage than he’s after in charm or satirical point of view, is so lengthily indulged she sucks oxygen away from everything around her. Offering too-occasional relief from the self-adoring dialogue, snatches of Dickinson’s own work are read aloud in Nixon’s voice – when, for instance, Vryling gets married like everyone else, leaving Emily alone with her melancholy in a church pew, or in a directly subsequent sequence when her father dies.
But the film swings between poles of lyrical misery and overbright repartee, gunning for a Whit Stillman-ish hilarity in that latter mode which feels, for Davies, like a foreign language.
There’s such promise here in the tragedy of Dickinson’s calling – lacking the self-esteem to pursue any romantic relationship, she plunged herself into work, only to find her poetic genius unrecognised by the patronising academe of the age.
Face-offs with publishers might have generated more voltage, perhaps, than they whip up on screen – “To me, the alteration of my punctuation marks is very hard to endure”, an ailing Emily hisses from the top of the stairs, in a line unlikely to win her any sub-editor friends.
Davies is clearly positing a link between his heroine’s acute unhappiness and physical decline, and Nixon lets this bitter core spread and envelop her in the film’s acridly shouty final stages – worsened, especially, by the hated infidelity of her brother Austin.
Duncan Duff makes a curious mess of this role, so it’s a mercy that Jennifer Ehle is on hand, as Emily’s heroically supportive sister Lavinia, to give easily the film’s most measured, least epigram-afflicted performance. The relationship of these two women, loving and challenging and fighting each other into spinsterhood, deserved a more focused film wholly to itself. It’s a quiet haven in the one we get.
