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All the best compliments are dubious – that is part of their charm

AlbaMoretz Haziran 06, 2022
This is a review of A Quiet Passion (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 March

This is a review of A Quiet Passion (2016)



So, indeed, A Quiet Passion (2016) has done – though it was good, at the time of viewing (and before much fatigue set on), to provide the Twitter accounts for the film and for its executive producers [@aquietpassion, @Gibson_MacLeod] some things that the account-holders were kind enough to Retweet !




As with John Keats, about whose love affair with Fanny Brawne Bright Star (2009) was wonderfully made by Jane Campion¹, Emily Dickinson’s poetry was very little recognized in her life-time (1830–1886²) : Keats, alive for less than half that span (1795-1821), did manage to publish, but was met with savaging reviews, whereas – to judge by Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion (2016) – Dickinson looked, with limited success, to a newspaper (The Springfield Republican), in terms both of which poems / how many were accepted for publication, and how little her style of punctuation was respected.



 Penguin Books published a source-book for the film, in Bright Star : Love Letter and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne (London, 2009) – one could wish for the sound-track album to have a bonus disc of Cynthia Nixon’s readings of Emily Dickinson's verse… !

Rivalling her aunt for ambitions to be recognized a poet, and to know in what good poetry consists, so arises Emily’s equivocal compliment to her aunt Elizabeth (Annette Badland), her response to being questioned about which heads this review : something about Dickinson’s conscience – although she has also been mercilessly and laughingly critical to her sister and ally Vinnie (Lavinia) – will not allow her to do more (or less) than wish her aunt’s poems the reception that they deserve. (As we watch, we, of course, know that it is Dickinson’s reputation that has lived on and grown – even if it does so partly on the basis of anecdotally being aware of her individual approach to punctuation and syntax, which Cynthia Nixon’s excellent reading of her texts dispels.)


In what Terence Davies presents of her character and demeanour, Emily Dickinson resembles Cordelia [from Shakespeare's King Lear], in that she cannot say what is convenient, even if it is what the other wants (or needs) to hear, and this quality is amongst those that lead to her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle) and she making friends with Vryling Buffam³ (Catherine Bailey), a newcomer to Amherst, even if we see how it causes tensions with their brother Austin, and father : the balance, though, is in favour of the trio’s good-natured and spirited behaviour, and so we hear nonsensical banter about Vryling's intentions and activities that would not be out of place in Monty Python. (Early on, she quips to the sisters, Don’t enjoy your prayer too much – it might become habit forming.) Or we witness the keen glee of Emily and Vinnie at the ineptitude of the dance-partner who has invited her onto the floor, and their waiting to hear her report (as shown in the image in the Tweet below - to the right of their sister-in-law Susan (Jodhi May) - played by Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle, respectively).



Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne in Bright Star (2009) [though the blossoms and blooms, which are beautifully necessary to the film, can be more readily seen in the trailer]


Even so, ‘the independence’ – as she puts it – that Emily Dickinson requires for her soul is what, in particular, leads her into various confrontations, including with her father, because, as we see at the start of the film (as considered below), she defies all tactics that would bully or coerce her into Christian belief : not, however, because she rejects it, but because she tries to be scrupulously honest with herself about her difficulties. (Helping her see herself in a more kind light, and also helping her see others (such as their brother Austin) differently, Davies shows us Emily’s sister playing a dual role towards her.)

The following exchange could have been taken from – and would not have been out of place in – Children (1976), say, or Of Time and the City (2008), because Terence Davies’ concerns and fascinations in life have been abiding :


Do you wish to come to God and be saved ?

I have no sense of my sins – and how can I ?


The words come from the opening moments of A Quiet Passion, when Emma Bell plays Dickinson (at Mount Holyoke ?), asserting herself - always an attraction to Davies, as a champion of independent minds (as it was with Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) in Sunset Song (2015).) In interview with Anne-Katrin Titze (‘Terence Davies on innocence, sin, half smiles and A Quiet Passion’), Davies questions the doctrine of original sin (arguing for the lack of any basis for it in The New Testament) in relation to Emily’s attitude.


Emma Bell (Emily, when younger)

Terence Davies has a strong feeling for the frailties and failings of the human heart, and – not in an anachronistic way – shows us moments pregnant with emotion. So, in the theatre, when Dickinson has been brought home by her family, and they are spending time with her aunt Elizabeth, he carefully has the motion of the camera swivel up to where they are sitting, but not detract from the moments when Emily dares speak to challenge her father’s disapproval of a woman being a vocalist, before it moves away again.


This exchange serves as a foretaste of the verbal play that we are to hear between Aunt Elizabeth and Emily’s sister, brother and her – where, coupled with the pretence, at least, of respect, there is also palpable mischief, as well as elegance and charm, in Emily’s and their words and vocabulary : as she smoothly declares Clarity is one thing, obviousness quite another ! We are ready to credit that Cynthia Nixon is Emily, we are glad to hear her read her work, in beautifully apt verse-reading.


Although very differently from the life of Chris Guthrie (in Sunset Song), where Davies is not only adapting a novel (rather than telling a person’s life from history), but also one that is set nearly thirty years after Dickinson’s death, and entering the period of The Great War, he again shows us how that of Emily Dickinson, and her sister Vinnie, is spent with that of their parents (played by Keith Carradine and Joanna Bacon) – even their brother Austin (Duncan Duff), with whose marital behaviour Dickinson allows herself to find fault (partly on account of her friendship with his wife, Susan (Jodhi May)), resides adjacently. In particular, we see a great tenderness towards, and in Vinnie’s and her care for, their mother (who has some unspecified poor health).



Towards the end of her life, Dickinson is seen to have convulsions : Davies does not seek to soften our experience, any more than he does with the grossness of Chris Guthrie’s distress at the hands of her father (Peter Mullan – John Guthrie) or husband (Kevin Guthrie – Ewan Tavendale) in Sunset Song, and – although in reality he may not delay immensely much longer than we would prefer – he does so sufficiently to show that he will not merely feature what happens to her – to tell us illustratively, as he could do in words – and then, as we desire, move on.



At the end of Emily's life also, as at the end of that of their mother, Austin and Vinnie are with her. We see her funeral², knowing that the time for her writing to find its proper evaluation is still to come...






 End-notes :

 ¹ With Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, respectively :


² Emily Dickinson is buried in Wildwood Cemetery, Amherst, MA.

 ³ Who confesses something to the effect that she sounds like an anagram !


Vryling (Catherine Bailey) and Emily (Cynthia Nixon)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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