I’ve got a tin ear when it comes to poetry, so, despite it being liberally used throughout the film, I can’t really appreciate the work of Emily Dickinson, even if she is widely regarded as one of the most important poets. In A Quiet Passion, she is portrayed by Cynthia Nixon (and Emily Bell briefly as a younger girl) in a role that is garnering her a lot of praise.
This truly is a film of two-halves. The first hour is a witty comedy full of barbed lines that the actors revel in delivering. It reminded me of last year’s Love and Friendship though it didn’t ever reach the heights that film achieved, and I was enjoying it a lot. Emily’s banter with her sharp friend Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey) is highly amusing and the, at times strained, but clearly loving relationship with her father, Edward (Keith Carradine) is well defined.
In the second half of the film, the lightness of touch is almost entirely dispensed with. Beset by failing health, deaths of her parents and her brother’s infidelity, Emily becomes bitter and withdrawn. Having done some reading afterwards, that appears to be an accurate, if exaggerated portrayal of her life, but it does not make for enjoyable viewing. In fact, it becomes more and more of a slog, and I wasn’t sorry to see Emily’s inevitable demise.
You can certainly see the acting from Nixon, but she is outshone, albeit in just the couple of scenes she appears in, by Jodhi May as her sister-in-law. May is an actress who consistently impresses but is sorely underused in movies.
Director Terence Davies, who has an impressive track record, provides a couple of nice flourishes. Two tracking shots, circling a room, are beautifully done and the process of changing the cast from the younger to older actors who played Emily and her siblings is shot ingeniously. But he does make the mistake of trying to portray too much of her life, a rather old fashioned move, instead of trying to concentrate on the most interesting part of it. However, that may be because there isn’t an awful lot of interest to shoot! With only a dozen poems published in her lifetime, to no acclaim, she lived a pretty dull life.
Rating 6 out of 10