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’.
