No filmmaker understands the look of the pain of loneliness like Terence Davies. In his early autobiographical films, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, Davies shows himself as a kid who doesn’t yet know he’s gay being ostracized and bullied, with a harsh, judgmental father to make things even worse. But in those films, Davies found refuge – Distant Voices Still Lives shows his working class Liverpool family singing in their cramped home. The exquisite The Long Day Closes shines with the sounds of movies from the late forties and early fifties, along with radio broadcasts – the places in imagination where this terrified, solitary boy found peace.
Davies’s version of Emily Dickinson finds little peace when she’s young and no peace at all when she gets older. Her sharp tongue sets her apart from most everyone, as do her socially unacceptable ideas about religion, and her unrelenting feminism. Dickinson had a brittle commitment to honesty and the truths she saw in human life; neither endeared her to the people around her.
Dickinson’s poetry is taut and spare. Her subjects are often death and the prospect of eternity, and the language of her short poems is precise with sometimes devastating rhymes. A Quiet Passion, written and directed by Davies and filmed by Florian Hoffmeister, looks like Dickinson’s poems sound. Davies uses long, steady, precise shots. When the camera moves, its pace is deliberate and never incidental. Camera moves can be so slow that the molding around doors and windows and on the walls starts to feel electric. It seems like an ecstatic forever when an uninterrupted show goes from the famous 19th century singer Jenny Lind onstage to the Dickinson family in a box looking down. Young Emily may have loved it, but her stern New England father is loaded with judgment about the impropriety of women onstage.
For most of the film, Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) is at home. The house and its garden outside are lovely and complex. Shots are full of contrasting environments and textures. As a shot moves inside the dark, decorous house, you might see candelabra, flasks, a vase with flowers, a fireplace, a bookshelf, and then a window framed by white lace curtains looking out onto the garden. Emily Dickinson sits in the room, her eyes far away, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back American Gothic-style, to make her as unattractive as possible. A Quiet Passion opens up the eccentric richness of this woman who rarely goes out of her house, yet her furious poet’s mind shapes these limited objects and experiences into a shimmering description of all existence. Dickinson looks like she fits nowhere at all. And this is how she says she feels about herself. Over these images, the film plays a number of her poems, as if they’re in Dickinson’s head, and the whole picture fits together.
As Dickinson ages, she becomes ever more reclusive – she forces a visitor to stand at the foot of the staircase while he talks to her standing behind a door upstairs. At this point, A Quiet Passion loses sight of a great poet struggling with her obscurity and loneliness. It bogs down in its misery. Dickinson’s conversation grows progressively both self-deprecating and hostile to others. Her morality turns slavish, intolerant and scornful of everyone but herself. It becomes hard to care about her.
Of course, the film uncovers the dreadful loneliness in this character. Dickinson seems clearly depressed and filled with self-loathing. Yet at the same time, watching the movie demands ever more discipline and struggle, as if director Terence Davies has veered from his understanding of loneliness and he simply pours on more details of Dickinson’s misery. A Quiet Passion is a brave portrait of Emily Dickinson and a brave film, but bravery may not be a good enough substitute for compassion.
