Monthly Archives: April 2017

  • A Quiet Passion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Davies (2016)

    Back in 1989, I walked out of Distant Voices, Still Lives.  After a Terence Davies sabbatical of nearly two decades, I’ve sat through Of Time and the City (2008), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and Sunset Song (2015) in recent years, and loathed all three.  With this track record, it doesn’t mean a lot to praise A Quiet Passion as easily the best Davies film I’ve seen.  But this Emily Dickinson biography really is a good picture.

    The very start isn’t encouraging.   A teacher at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts enjoins a class of teenage girls to stand to the right or the left according to how fully they embrace the religious dogma taught by the institution.  The only girl who doesn’t make a move in either direction is the young Emily Dickinson (Emma Bell).  She’s asked to explain herself; when she does so, her heterodoxy is deemed tantamount to apostasy.  The sheep-and-goats-type division and Emily’s solitary, stationary rebellion are visually arresting but the teacher, Miss Lyon[1], is played (by Sara Vertongen) in a style familiar from earlier Davies films – the one-note severity is not only obvious but hollow.  Emily’s father Edward (Keith Carradine), her brother Austin (Benjamin Wainwright) and her sister Vinnie (Rose Williams) arrive to take Emily out of the Seminary.  The journey back to the family home in nearby Amherst includes a visit to Edward’s aunt (Annette Badland), who then comes for a short stay with her nephew, his wife (Joanna Bacon) and their three children.  Aunt Elizabeth’s penchant for moral censure with a religious flavour also provokes sharp exchanges with Emily.  By the time the aunt takes her leave of the family, the static visuals and the studied verbal wit of A Quiet Passion have begun to acquire a deeper meaning.

    When Edward Dickinson sits for a photographic portrait, Terence Davies achieves an effect that’s remarkable both technically and artistically.  Edward’s face ages, gradually and exceptionally convincingly.  Davies then applies the same technique to the faces of Edward’s daughters and son and the effect is all the more remarkable:  whereas Keith Carradine plays Edward throughout, the faces of Emily, Vinnie and Austin turn into those of different actors – Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle and Duncan Duff respectively.   The unmoving camera’s observation of changing faces chimes with how the characters, especially the reclusive protagonist, will spend their lives from this point onwards.  The remainder of A Quiet Passion is virtually confined to the Dickinsons’ home – its grounds and, much more often, its interiors.  The contrast of the restricted field of action with Emily’s verbal and spiritual animation is increasingly powerful.   Also powerful, in this context, are the rare outbursts of intense physical activity, such as the convulsions that Emily suffers (symptoms of the Bright’s Disease her doctor diagnoses). While her mother’s chronic illness is a hardly explained neurasthenic melancholy, her eventual death has a startling reality.  This is thanks largely to the visual and sonic details of her agony:  the image of Mrs Dickinson, almost motionless in bed, one daughter on either side of her, stands comparison with Bergman’s famous tableau in Cries and Whispers; the stertorous breathing on the soundtrack counterpoints the formal dignity of the pictorial composition.  The reality results too from the viewer’s understanding of what this experience means to Emily, who has described her poems as ‘my only solace for the eternity which surrounds us all’.  At her mother’s bedside she seems vindicated in her apprehension of the ubiquity of death in life.

    At the start of the film, the epigrammatic wit seems unnatural.  As the claustrophobic setting develops, Emily’s words turn into real weaponry.  At the same time, they add to the claustrophobia:  the relentlessly caustic turns of phrase are as oppressive as the confined spaces.  The elaborate, competitive dialogue is, in its inescapability, reminiscent of Ivy Compton Burnett’s but it comes across – unlike Compton Burnett’s – not as the expression of authorial misanthropy but as this particular protagonist’s sole means of asserting herself.  The younger Emily’s sparring with her great-aunt, although it’s combative, is well contrasted with the more complex urgency of the older Emily’s sallies.  Words are signally important too to other female characters in A Quiet Passion whose scope for individual self-expression is thwarted by gender inequality – although it was less clear to me throughout why the social and romantic horizons of the conventionally attractive (and attractively conventional) Vinnie Dickinson were as limited as her elder sister’s.

    Terence Davies does an admirable job of illustrating his heroine’s exceptional twofold isolation – her sexual insecurity and her intimations of mortality are both highly developed.  She doesn’t believe she could be physically desirable to a man:  it’s upsetting that the men she’s smitten with are neither especially handsome nor otherwise attractive – for example, the Reverend Wadsworth (Eric Loren), who is, inexplicably to Emily, happily married.  (His alarmingly humourless wife (Simone Milsdochter) abstains from drinking even tea.)  Fears of loneliness and death converge in Emily’s anguished complaint to her sister:  ‘They all leave!’  The self-imposed, inexorable narrowing of her routines gives her sequestered domestic existence a growing similarity to that of a nun in a closed order.  This reinforces our sense of thoughts of eternity being central to her existence, though with fewer religious consolations than the nun comparison implies.

    The primacy and abundance of language in A Quiet Passion naturally put a heavy responsibility on Davies’s cast.  The acting is variable.  The Dickinson sisters’ friend Vryling Wilder Buffum is, as much as anyone, verbally alert (she remarks that her own name sounds like an anagram).  Catherine Bailey, who plays her, isn’t inside her lines – she always suggests an actress relishing what she’s been given to say rather than an actual young woman savouring her words and their implications.  Even allowing for Austin Dickinson’s weakness of character, Duncan Duff’s playing of him is bland, though Jodhi May does well as Austin’s wife, Susan.  Keith Carradine, now in his late sixties, has a noble mien but rarely sounds as good as he looks.  Joanna Bacon and Annette Badland are excellent as the older women.  Jennifer Ehle occasionally seems eager for more of the limelight than the script allows.  Still, her portrait of Vinnie is one of Ehle’s more appealing performances.

    Until now, the most celebrated impersonation of Emily Dickinson has been Julie Harris’s.  She played Dickinson (and numerous other characters with whom the poet interacts) in William Luce’s one-woman theatre play The Belle of Amherst, which ran on Broadway in 1976.  (Harris subsequently toured in the production and a recording of her stage performance was transmitted on PBS television in the US.)  Cynthia Nixon somewhat resembles Julie Harris facially (more than either of them resembles the actual Dickinson).  In incidental moments, Nixon occasionally calls to mind too the woman in Grant Wood’s American Gothic but her characterisation is thoroughly and strongly individual.  Cynthia Nixon was pretty well just a name to me before watching this film (the only time I remember seeing her before was in An Englishman in New York).   She plays Emily Dickinson with impressive inner force.  Her every expression, whether facial or verbal, is convincingly felt.  Her readings of the poems are impressive, not least because they’re firmly in character.

    There are a few moments of lame expository dialogue (like the news that shots have been fired at Fort Sumter, followed by ‘Does this mean civil war?’ etc).  The phrase ‘a quiet passion’ may be Emily Dickinson’s; if not, it has a faintly condescending ring (which proves to be wholly misleading).  But these flaws, set against the merits of the piece, are minor.  The fine lighting is by Florian Hoffmeister.  This was the first time I appreciated the singing voices that have become a hallmark of Terence Davies’s cinema (though I could have done without the glass-shattering soprano of Marieke Bresseleers’s Jenny Lind, in a concert performance by the Swedish nightingale that the Dickinsons attend).  Leading American women poets of the twentieth century have been poorly served in biopics of the twenty-first:  Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia (2003) was a feeble account of the life, death and art of Sylvia Plath; Reaching for the Moon (2013), Bruno Barreto’s exploration of Elizabeth Bishop, wasn’t much better.  Terence Davies steps back in time but his film, in terms of imaginative engagement with its subject, is a big leap forward from those others.

    13 April 2017

    [1]  This may or may not be Mary Lyon who was, according to the Mount Holyoke College website, its founder (in 1837) and a ‘chemist and educator’.

  • I Am Not Your Negro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Raoul Peck (2016)

    Raoul Peck’s documentary sets out to commemorate James Baldwin and to provoke.  It succeeds in both aims.  In 1979, Baldwin wrote to his literary agent, outlining plans for his next book:  ‘Remember This House’ would be a memoir of Baldwin’s relationships with three leading figures in the Civil Rights movement, each of whom had been assassinated – Medgar Evans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.  As the prologue to I Am Not Your Negro explains, Baldwin didn’t get beyond thirty pages of notes for ‘Remember This House’; these notes, and other extracts from his non-fiction writings about America’s racial past, present and prospects, provide the central narrative to Peck’s film.   Baldwin’s words, read by Samuel L Jackson, are complemented – for the most part, reinforced – by a rich collection of clips and images that illustrate contemporary conventions and controversies around race.  This comprises actuality footage, some of it featuring Baldwin as a participant in televised debates or chat shows; screen and magazine advertisements confirming social-ethnic stereotypes; and numerous excerpts from Hollywood films.  These last range chronologically from a 1927 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the final silent-movie version of the book), through 1950s pictures such as No Way Out and The Defiant Ones, to the notorious 1967 duo, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and In the Heat of the Night.

    At the start of I Am Not Your Negro, there’s a clip of James Baldwin on The Dick Cavett Show:  although Raoul Peck doesn’t date this, the interview in fact took place in June 1968, just two months after the death of Martin Luther King (and the week following Robert Kennedy’s assassination). Dick Cavett makes painstaking (almost painful) efforts to avoid the wrong words in what he asks Baldwin.  The answer Cavett gets to his question about the state of race relations – ‘Is it at once getting better and still hopeless?’ – is:

    ‘I don’t think there’s much hope for it to tell you the truth, as long as people are using this peculiar language. It’s not a question what happens to the negro here, or the black man here. That’s a very good question for me, but the real question is “what’s going to happen to this country”?’

    James Baldwin died in 1987.  Raoul Peck’s selection of news film and photographs also includes the LAPD beating of Rodney King in 1991, the faces of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Trayvon Martin and others, the Ferguson riots of 2014 – all in order to prove the accuracy of Baldwin’s gloomy prophesies.   Samuel L Jackson is vocally very different from Baldwin, in natural timbre and conscious tone.  Baldwin’s voice is higher-pitched and strikingly mobile; he’s also very angry – we see as well as hear that in his several appearances during I Am Not Your Negro.  Jackson’s readings have a measured resonance and express an impassioned yet dignified sorrowfulness – an elder statesman’s feelings of regret.   This register serves to emphasise what Peck means to demonstrate:  that, as James Baldwin forecast, things haven’t got better.  As the sub-heading to Hilton Als’s piece about the film and its subject in the New Yorker (13 February 2017) puts it:  ‘Raoul Peck seems to be stepping in to make the movie that Baldwin couldn’t’.

    Peck makes the movie that Baldwin couldn’t to the extent of limiting his perspective to the expression of Baldwin’s point of view.  The words in the script are all the latter’s.  Except for the brief dissenting intervention of the Harvard philosophy professor Paul Weiss, a fellow guest on the 1968 Cavett show, there’s no interrogation of Baldwin’s pronouncements.  Another remarkable set of excerpts is from a Cambridge University debate of 1965 (remarkable partly as a reminder that debates of this kind were once televised):  Baldwin’s furious eloquence is not only impressive but also, in what Raoul Peck chooses to show, uncontested.  (It isn’t explained that the motion was ‘Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?’, that it was carried by 544 votes to 164 or that Baldwin’s adversary in the debate was William F Buckley Jr.)  There’s a brief clip too from a US Information Agency film of August 1963, the ‘Hollywood Roundtable’, featuring Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Joseph Mankiewicz and Sidney Poitier, all of whom had participated in the March on Washington:  we’re shown their faces but hear few of their words.  Baldwin mentions having ‘crossed swords’ with the separatist Malcolm X but Peck doesn’t provide an illustration of public disagreement between them (an audio recording of a debate between the two men is available on YouTube, by the way).

    I don’t know enough about James Baldwin the cultural commentator to be sure of how accurately Raoul Peck represents his views.  What’s not in doubt is that, in order for Baldwin to be portrayed as soothsayer of the Black Lives Matter era, Peck has to accentuate the negative in what Baldwin said and wrote about race.  As a result, however, you’re left wondering what Baldwin recommended in order to improve the situation.  He insists that he ‘can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive … so I’m forced to be an optimist’ but this comes over as sophistry.  As I watched I Am Not Your Negro (and as always tends to happen in an argument with someone whose speed of thought and, especially, of utterance exceeds your own), I kept wanting to say to its dominant voice, ‘Yes, but hang on …’:  for example, when Baldwin avers there’s no difference between the American North and South – ‘it’s one country for a Negro …There’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact’.  Although he was an integrationist, some of Baldwin’s remarks here amount to a kind of cryptic emotional separatism.  ‘I may or may not be bitter,’ he says, ‘but if I were, I’d have good reasons for it’.   He warns his white audience that ‘I know more about you than you know about me’.

    Many in the audience will know, however, about Baldwin’s homosexuality and suspect that Raoul Peck, in giving his subject an exclusively racial identity, is leaving out a lot.  Baldwin explains on the Cavett show the feelings of exclusion and vulnerability that impelled him to emigrate to Paris, at the age of twenty-four, in 1948.  It’s understandable that he didn’t mention, on primetime TV in the late 1960s, that being gay contributed considerably to those feelings but Peck’s reticence about Baldwin’s sexuality seems evasive.  The three figures around whom ‘Remember This House’ was to be structured are minor and undifferentiated presences in I Am Not Your Negro – undifferentiated because Peck is keen to present blackness as a generalised identity and experience.  Baldwin recalls how he learned of the deaths of Medgar Evans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – in each case, through a mood-shattering telephone call:  this repetition is so dramatically neat that it comes across as borderline artificial.  The circumstances in which Baldwin learned of King’s death are undeniably startling – and another instance where the intentional narrowness of Raoul Peck’s approach is frustrating.  Baldwin was in Palm Springs working on a screenplay for a Malcolm X biographical drama.  The project didn’t come to fruition (it was more than two decades later that Spike Lee’s biopic reached the screen); but you’d love to know Baldwin’s thoughts on the speed at which, just three years after Malcolm’s death, the life of so politically controversial a figure had been absorbed into mainstream movie development, and how Baldwin himself was drawn into this.  Elsewhere, he makes trenchant comments about Hollywood and its presentation of African-American characters but he’s silent – or silenced by Raoul Peck – on this trickier matter.

    As well as Evans, Malcolm X and King, there’s another major minor presence:  he’s on screen for all of twenty seconds yet it’s important to mention Barack Obama because he is, in the context of this film, such an ambiguous figure.   Peck gives less time to Obama than to Robert Kennedy’s tentatively expressed hope that there might be a black US president in the foreseeable future, and to James Baldwin’s scathing response to Kennedy’s prediction, which Baldwin understandably perceives as patronising – and hollow:  he clearly doesn’t believe this could happen.  It’s interesting that, while Kennedy is vague about the timeframe, Baldwin infers ‘in forty years’ time’ from what he says.  Kennedy made these remarks in 1965; add four decades and move to the next presidential year and you reach 2008. The brevity of the footage of Barack and Michelle Obama may therefore reflect Raoul Peck’s anxiety to pass as quickly as possible over something James Baldwin didn’t see coming – though you wonder if it also conveys Peck’s disappointment with the first African-American presidency.  Whatever the reason, I Am Not Your Negro is, like Get Out, a film whose bleak view of US race relations has gained credibility in the light of what’s happened in America since it got made.   It’s to be hoped this impression will soon change but the Obamas have receded rapidly into the past:  with Donald Trump in the White House, they’ve become, for the time being, almost chimerical figures.  (Peck’s decision to film them in slow motion somehow emphasises the couple’s dreamlike quality.)

    I Am Not Your Negro, which runs a trim ninety-three minutes, was nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.  The prize went to Ezra Edelman’s O J: Made in America – a very different take on American racial history in the second half of the twentieth century.   Sally and I watched Edelman’s (perfectly named) piece recently, over three or four sittings, on BBC iPlayer; it clearly is, notwithstanding its technical eligibility for the Oscar, more a television documentary than a cinema one. With a total running time of 467 minutes, it also has the time to develop a much more nuanced approach than I Am Not Your Negro and Edelman exploits that potential admirably.  Raoul Peck, in his narrower way, makes highly effective use throughout of enraging clips and images.  Audible proof of this came in the repeated horrified gasps from a woman in the row behind me at the Bertha Dochouse screening I attended.  The risk with Peck’s emotive, button-pushing approach, however, is that his audience will get so caught up in the succession of awful pictures that we won’t distinguish them properly.  That woman’s yelps were identical in response to the Rodney King footage and to a clip showing, and purporting to deplore, the rape of a naked Cheyenne woman by US soldiers, from Ralph Nelson’s revisionist Western Soldier Blue (1970).

    A more serious difficulty is that, while Peck’s images are shocking in themselves, his selection understates the extent of the issues perceived by James Baldwin – witness his vigorous riposte to Paul Weiss on The Dick Cavett Show about the inherent racism of American institutional structures, or his summary of differing racial reactions to the end of The Defiant Ones.  The escaped prisoner played by Sidney Poitier relinquishes his chance of freedom, in a show of solidarity with the Tony Curtis character, who isn’t able to jump with Poitier onto a moving train.  White audiences, says Baldwin, applauded Poitier’s self-sacrifice; black audiences were dismayed by it.  James Baldwin clearly saw problems larger and deeper than the incidences and consequences of police brutality that Raoul Peck puts on the screen.  As those provocative comments about castration suggest, Baldwin was well aware of the damage non-physical abuse can do.  His words eventually overpower the sticks and stones in evidence in I Am Not Your Negro.

    11 April 2017

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