'A Quiet Passion': EW Review (original) (raw)

Published on April 14, 2017 02:12PM EDT

Photo: A Quiet Passion/Hurricane Films/Music Box Films

Putting a life of the mind on paper is one thing; finding a way to translate to the screen is a trickier proposition. Terence Davies’ portrait of poet Emily Dickinson — who died in 1886 at age 55, virginal and virtually unknown — is, like its subject, a strange bird: ethereal but severe, full of dreamy flights and odd formalities. Played in early scenes by Emma Bell, Dickinson seems like the kind of young woman who might have become a suffragette firebrand, openly challenging authority and the obedient, God-fearing hypocrisies of her peers. But she’s also guided by her own rigid codes and phobias, and Cynthia Nixon embodies the adult Emily as both a radical romantic and a priggish scold, so wedded to her version of moral truth that it almost cracks her open to live in the world like most people do.

And so, eventually, she doesn’t — and her family, including her stern but loving father (Keith Carradine) and devoted sister Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle), end up a party to her undoing, treating her like a hothouse flower to be carefully tended and protected until she becomes a sort of jittery, self-imposed recluse. (Her extreme isolation makes it unsurprising that the few outside connections she does forge have the tortured, feverish intensity of unrequited love.)

Writer-director Davies (The House of Mirth) manages to capture at least some of the metaphysical swoon of Dickinson’s work in a series of beautifully composed images, which is a feat in itself. And Nixon vividly telegraphs both her character’s convictions and her deep physical and emotional suffering. But the movie is also hobbled by its insistent lack of naturalism; characters don’t so much engage each other as speechify in grand, self-aware paragraphs as if every dinner-table musing is being recorded for posterity. Though of course some of them will be, and that’s where A Quiet Passion finds its most transcendent moments: in the immortal, extraordinary verses Dickinson left behind. B