A Quiet Passion (2017)

A Quiet Passion (2017)

IMDB Rating : 7.1/10 (as on 22.04.2017)

PG-13 | 2h 5min | Biography, Drama

The story of American poet Emily Dickinson from her early days as a young schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist.

Director: Terence Davies

Writer: Terence Davies

Stars: Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Duncan Duff

IMDB link Here

A Biopic Told With Poetic Scope

David Sims

Leave it to an intimate biopic of the reclusive 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson to feature the most powerful special effect of the year. The first 20 minutes of A Quiet Passion follow Dickinson as a teenager, played by Emma Bell; she attends a Christian boarding school at which she is not exactly impudent, but certainly eager to challenge and pick apart any dictum her teachers throw at her. She writes with fervor, attends the opera with her family, and astonishes her disapproving aunt with her untamed intellectual curiosity. “I shall pray for you all,” her aunt tuts upon leaving the homestead. “And remember, keep atheism at bay, and watch the clock that ticks for us all.”

With that, the writer-director Terence Davies sets the clock ticking, and tilts his film away from this traditional biopic territory and into something far more mesmerizing. One by one, each member of Emily’s family sits for a daguerreotype, and the camera slowly pushes in on them, their features subtly morphing through the passage of time. Some, like her father Edward (played by Keith Carradine), only add wrinkles and lose a little hair; others, like Emily, her brother Austin, and her sister Vinnie, turn into new actors. The effect is astonishing, and not even because of the seamlessness of the transition between Bell and Cynthia Nixon, who plays Dickinson as an adult.

These silent, slow shots evoke the frightening feeling of life slipping away, of exuberance lost and experience gained. There’s a poetic scope that feels entirely out of the ordinary for such a cloistered period biopic; a sense of the magnificent beauty of being alive, coupled with the melancholy that comes with years passing. If summarized, A Quiet Passion might sound like a rather staid experience—a stuffy, educational museum piece. But this is a wonderful work of cinema that doesn’t offer the bullet points of Dickinson’s reclusive existence so much as it captures her spirit.

 Davies’s script works to sweep away many of the clichéd notions about Dickinson: that she was some sort of caustic loon, shuttered up in her room writing on scraps of paper and rejecting social contact.

As Dickinson, Nixon gives a vivid performance of someone simultaneously invigorated by ideas and intellect, but frequently deprived of ways to direct them. Her work is either met with confusion or entirely ignored and dismissed. Her skepticism about religion raises many an eyebrow (even though she does not dismiss the idea of God, more the stifling rules established in his name). Her nerviness around people, and her inability to lock her opinions away as might be expected of a Massachusetts woman in the mid-19th century, makes her both a curiosity and a cautionary figure.

As Emily grows older and sicker, and her life becomes more embittered and remote, A Quiet Passion abandons narrative altogether and hints at transcendence. The cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister’s gorgeous camerawork, and the soundtrack (consisting of classical pieces) do most of the heavy lifting, suggesting Dickinson’s connection to a grander force—be it her mighty, largely unacknowledged creativity or something spiritual—without abandoning the trappings of her Amherst homestead. Davies’s biopic is a brilliant chronicling of a life lived quietly, one that is sweeping in its emotional depth rather than its narrative scope.

 Read full review at Atlantic

‘A Quiet Passion’ Poetically Captures Emily Dickinson

A.O. SCOTT

New England in the mid-19th century was a literary hothouse, overgrown with wild and exotic talents. That Emily Dickinson was among the most dazzling of these is not disputable, but to say that she was obscure in her own time would exaggerate her celebrity. A handful of her poems appeared in print while she was alive (she died in 1886, at 55), but she preferred private rituals of publication, carefully writing out her verses and sewing them into booklets.

An admirer can be forgiven for approaching “A Quiet Passion,” Terence Davies’s new movie about Dickinson’s life, with trepidation. The literalness of film and the creaky conventions of the biopic threaten to dissolve that strangeness, to domesticate genius into likable quirkiness. But Mr. Davies, whose work often blends public history and private memory, possesses a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.

 To Dickinson — played in the long afternoon of her adult life by Cynthia Nixon — the enemy of poetry is obviousness. (It is a vice she finds particularly obnoxious in the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the reigning poet of the age.) “A Quiet Passion” refuses the obvious at every turn. The romantically disappointed recluse of “The Belle of Amherst,” William Luce’s sturdy, sentimental play, has been replaced by a prickly, funny, freethinking intellectual, whose life is less a chronicle of withdrawal from the world than a series of explosive engagements with the universe. The passion is not so quiet, really. Dickinson muses and ponders, yes, but she also seethes, scolds, teases and bursts out laughing.

 “A Quiet Passion” suggests that the mixture of austerity and extravagance in her verse was shaped partly by an environment in which religious severity coexisted with aesthetic and intellectual experimentation. (That aunt may have disapproved of the performance, but she still went.)

This is a visually gorgeous film — full of sunlight and flowers, symmetry and ornament — that also feels refreshingly plain. The smooth, almost lyrical movement of the camera conveys lightness and gravity, much in the way that some of Dickinson’s poems do. Like her voice, it seems to have been set loose in time, to rush forward or to linger as the meaning and the meter require, to turn time itself into a series of riddles. The movie lasts for two hours, or 37 years, or the difference between now and forever, or the span of an idea.

It is dominated by a single voice: Ms. Nixon’s, reciting stanzas instead of voice-over narration and cracking impish, sometimes impious jokes with the marvelous Ms. Ehle. A novel of family life writes itself between the lines, full of memorable characters and dramatic scenes. Parents grow old and die. Austin marries and then has an affair, a transgression that enrages Emily. She and Vinnie seem to exist in precise, kinetic counterpoint, like the left and right hands of a piano étude.

Not everything is harmony. If one of the film’s threads is the existential conundrum that most directly informs Dickinson’s poetry — what it is like to live from moment to moment with the knowledge of eternity — another is the dialectic of freedom and authority that defined her life. Ms. Nixon’s Dickinson is a natural feminist, but she also naturally submits, as her siblings do, to their father’s will. When she wants to write late at night, she asks his permission, noting later that no husband would have granted it. She is submissive and rebellious in ways that defy easy summary. Like the other great American poet of her century, Walt Whitman, she contradicts herself.

And though “A Quiet Passion” is small — modest in scope, inward rather than expansive, precise in word and gesture — it contains multitudes. It opens a window into an era whose political and moral legacies are still with us, and illuminates, with a practiced portraitist’s sureness of touch, the mind of someone who lived completely in her time, knowing all the while that she would eventually escape it.

Read full review at New york times

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆  

Terence Davies' Emily Dickinson biopic finds beauty in the little things

Andrew Pulver

A Quiet Passion sees Davies returning again to some familiar themes. His Dickinson – superbly played with a sort of restless passivity by Cynthia Nixon – is, like Sunset Song’s Chris Guthrie, a figure trapped by history and circumstance, desperate to find an outlet for the overwhelming emotions surging inside her. The internal politics of the family plays a dominant path in both – though in A Quiet Passion, the Dickinson paterfamilias Edward (Keith Carradine) is a figure of stern rectitude, for sure, but a long way from the demonic, violent father-figures in which Davies has previously specialised. Dickinson, in her emotional isolation and determination to confound suffocating social norms, also shares something with the Lily Bart of Davies’ 2000 masterpiece The House of Mirth.

Dickinson’s circumscribed life, with its interiorised focus, is certainly a challenge for film adaptation, and Davies’ solution – perhaps inevitably – is to cast it as a chamber drama, almost literally. A Quiet Passion rarely ventures outside Dickinson’s study, bedroom or living room, and makes the most of even the most minor of incidents. When Dickinson conceives a characteristically understated passion for a local clergyman – so understated, it’s only after an argument with her sister that you realise she was ever in love with him at all – the act of inviting him and his sanctimonious wife round for tea becomes a highly charged, meaningful encounter.

Above all, though, it is Davies’ ability to invest even the most apparently-humdrum moments with some form of intense radiance that sustains his film. Every shot is beautifully composed and lit – as we have come to expect – and the actors deliver every line with absolute conviction. Dropping key poems on to the soundtrack may be a conventional move, but Davies’ selection is unerring and reinforces the emotion at every point. Classical though his shooting style may be, Davies isn’t afraid to try a little digital trickery: he overcomes the awkward age-jump moment when the younger actors are jettisoned by a smart ageing process in a portrait-photography studio.

After a long period in the wilderness, A Quiet Passion is Davies’ third feature since his comeback documentary Of Time and the City, following the Terence Rattigan adaptation The Deep Blue Sea, and then Sunset Song. We should be relieved that there’s no diminution of powers: rather, the opposite, in that Davies appears to be getting better every time. 

Read full review at The Guardian

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟✬ 

Emily Dickinson tale 'A Quiet Passion' burns bright

There is something deeply funny and also beautiful about the idea that it would take a British man in his 70s to make the definitive film about one of America's greatest female poets. But that's what Terence Davies has done for Emily Dickinson in "A Quiet Passion ," a fiercely intelligent, handsome and affecting rendering of Dickinson's extraordinary, ordinary life from her teenage years to her death in 1886.

It's the kind of breath of fresh air experience that sneaks up on you and proves to be a welcome respite from the growing noise of early summer movies. Davies' script is filled to the brim with witty observations and barbs that you'll want to scribble down, remember and recite. How many movies can you say that about lately?

She's the perpetual outsider, who doesn't fit in the world at large, only at home with her mother, father, brother and sister. She leaves school, saying with a coy smile that she's ill from an "acute case of evangelism," and retreats to Amherst for the majority of her days.

The world is bright and full of possibility for young Emily. She asks her bemused father (Keith Carradine) for permission to stay awake and write her poetry in the quiet of the night. She spars with her conservative aunt with glee. She relishes in her otherness, taking pleasure in making those around her uncomfortable with her wry remarks and sharp tongue. But she doesn't need others - she has her family.

And then age hits. Time passes, conveyed by an unsettling sequence showing the morphing of the Dickinson family's faces into their older selves, and the sadness and eventually bitterness starts to creep in.

Cynthia Nixon now inhabits Emily, Jennifer Ehle is her sister Vinnie and Duncan Duff is her brother Austin. There is still vigor and energy in all, but life has tempered that a bit. Emily finds a lively companion in Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey), who is even more modern than Emily. But Vryling manages to delight in the silly constrictions of their society where Emily is deeply conflicted and tormented by pressures of piety, decorum and what she feels is right.

And the world only seems to disappoint Emily as time goes on. Some of her poems are published, but not enough. She falls madly in love with a married pastor, but he does not return her affections. Her married brother falls for another woman. Her health begins to fail. And then there's death, which looms everywhere.

"A Quiet Passion" is a film of easy beauty - the palette favors soft blues, yellows, whites and greens. But while the visuals and steady shots are often relaxing, at the heart is a searing and soulful performance of an anguished artist born into the wrong time. Nixon gives a new life and a womanly dimension to someone who, beyond her haunting words, we only really know visually as a perpetual teenager. Her poetry is a backdrop, used like a well-placed music cue at key points in the story.

Davies, it turns out, was the perfect filmmaker to tell her story - poetically, humanely and unflinchingly.

Read full review at Daily Mail

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟☆☆  

Underneath the parasol-twirling, there's a great Emily Dickinson biopic struggling to get out

Tim Robey

“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.

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.

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.

Read full review at Telegraph

 Who better than Terence Davies, the introspective director of finely detailed literary adaptations such as Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and the Scottish Sunset Song, to bring a definitive biography of revered 19th century poet Emily Dickinson to the screen? That, at least, is the premise that will draw many bookish viewers into theaters to see Cynthia Nixon pull back her hair severely and don the constricting taffeta gowns of the role. But despite a warmly interacting cast that includes Jennifer Ehle as Emily’s sister and Keith Carradine as her lion-maned, lionized father, and a valiant effort on the part of Nixon and Davies to externalize the poet’s inner demons in emotional, high-tension scenes, the film can’t escape an underlying static quality that extinguishes the flame before it can get burning.

Shot largely in Belgium, with some location shooting in Amherst, Mass., Davies relies heavily on expressively lit interiors to convey intimate sentiments, as delicate as the refined language of the day. Dickinson was a homebody who eventually turned into a full-fledged recluse, refusing to leave her well-to-do family’s comfortable house and charming backyard garden.

It is a frustration compounded by the elaborate language used for dialogue by all the characters, as though no one in the family ever spoke in simple direct sentences. Like the difficult Scottish dialogue in Sunset Song, the formal period language of the screenplay sets a tone, but also raises a serious obstacle to understanding that persists throughout the film. Though the cast delivers their lines with nonchalance, it takes the ear time to process the unfamiliar phrasing.

Far from the glamour of Sex and the City here, Nixon undergoes a rather devastating transition from plain Jane youth into ailing adulthood. While she repeated protests to her bewitchingly handsome sister and brother that she's too ugly to find a suitor, she does everything in her power to alienate the few who dare to court her. Nixon skirts but sidesteps the theatrical in this complex role. Faithfully at her side, Ehle shows a combo of sense and sensibility that is much easier to love.

As with many of Davies’ films, there is much to admire in the meticulous period recreation and a dazzling use of light and motion that create an unforgettable feeling of place and time. Cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister has a soulful approach to describing the oppressive warmth of 19th century interiors, and their harmony is restful without ever boring. The musical choices, so important in the directors' films, are fewer here and stick to the classics: Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin and Bellini.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 

Davies meets Dickinson and the result is a masterpiece of mood

Geoffrey Macnab

Films by Terence Davies tend not to come along very often. He is indisputably one of the great British directors of his era, but he is not one of the most prolific. It is therefore all the more heartening to encounter A Quiet Passion only a few months after his last feature, Sunset Song, was in cinemas.

A Quiet Passion is a biopic of the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson. It is an exceptional film with a searing central performance from Cynthia Nixon in a role a long way removed from her Miranda Hobbes in Sex And The City.

The mood of A Quiet Passion switches dramatically. In its first half, the film has a jaunty, comic air. We see Emily (played as a young woman by Emma Bell) exasperating her teachers by refusing to accept their strictures on religion. Back home, she strikes up a firm friendship with Miss Buffum (Catherine Bailey), a wonderfully cynical and witty neighbour with an acerbic tongue.

With its sweeping camera work and shots of the defiant womenfolk twirling their parasols and snapping their fans, the film resembles one of those old Hollywood musicals that Davies so admires. There are dance sequences and much more colour than you might expect.

Much of the film is set indoors. This is a very faithful recreation of Dickinson’s world but it never feels stolid. The fluid cinematography – those wonderful gliding shots that are found in many of Davies’s films – and the sheer liveliness of the writing and the performances add energy to the storytelling. From time to time, we hear passages of Dickinson’s verse, read beautifully by Nixon, on the soundtrack.

In its depiction of physical pain, the film rekindles memories both of Bergman’s Cries And Whispers and of the death scene in Davies’s own Distant Voices, Still Lives.

The film, though, ends with grace and lyricism – and a very moving rendition of what is probably Dickinson’s best-known poem: “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me...”

Read full review at The Independent