A biopic about the Americanpoètesse maudite Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), directed by the British aesthete Terence Davies, A QUIET PASSION studiously bootstraps Dickinson’s disconcerted inscape through family ties and her poetry, from a young gal (Bell), who repudiates religious insularity, to her grown-up stature (played by a dauntless Nixon, and the film features a transcendent aging-morphing CGI process) of a woman enthralled by independence and sisterhood shared with her younger sister Lavinia (a modest but benignly discerning appearance from the ever-absorbing Jennifer Ehle) and a common friend Vryling Buffum (Bailey, who constantly spouts her repartee with a haughty elocution which hardly justifies the sisters’ fondness for her).
Suffusing with Emily’s own verses through Nixon’s creaky voice, the words have a delicacy of a porcelain vase surmounted at the edge of a towering shelf, ready to embrace their perdition just by a single nudge, as in the antinomy between the two most distinctive themes of her creations: death and immortality. Emily, is a contradiction, during the tenor of her life descending into reclusive spinsterhood, she is recalcitrant in defying the subservience of an almighty being, but at the same time, it is as if she has made a pact with God, to abstain from all the mundane temptations (a magic moment occurs only in her imagination decked with a slow-motion flourish when a man seems to walk into her life) in exchange of a ceaseless fount of her inspiration, and the resultant suffering becomes her cross to bear.
In the later stage of her life, when death snatches both her parents (played by Carradine and a lyrically sorrowful Bacon), andembittered cynicism starts to get the better of her unalloyed spirit, Emily’s eccentricity can legitimately make one’s hackles rise owing toDavies’ uncompromising projection of her increasingly wayward deportment and whims, eschewing from being a hagiography, the film certifies that prickliness is as essential as poignancy in the character arc since no one is perfect, although Davies’ methodology is perversely rough-and-ready in terms of emotional outpourings, but thankfully, poised by a gaunt Cynthia Nixon, her central performance proffers strong ballast for all the verbal lashing-out, bloody-minded confrontation and highfalutin melodrama, and her epileptic spasm can simply humble any of those spooky manifestations in the exorcism horror genre.
A prestige period drama in its core festooned by a quaintly somber hue and ample classic accompaniments (whether diegetic or not), A QUIET PASSION is not an instant crowd-pleaser but a cerebral threnody of a flesh-and-blood individual, it might not invite all the audience to her (sometimes navel-gazing) poems, but it certainly triumphs in its sagacious dissection of a troubled soul, trying to find her peace with this cruel world.
referential points: Davies’ THE DEEP BLUE SEA (2011, 5.7/10), THE HOUSE OF MIRTH (2000, 7.7/10).
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