Never has the phrase, "I suffer for my art, now it's your turn," been more apt. Cynthia Nixon is actually very good as tortured poet Emily Dickinson. It's just that the script is way too sluggish. And directory Terence Davies so slavishly wishes to depict Emily's dour, dark, indoors world, not to mention her black as pitch interior psyche, that he forgets how maudlin it comes across to the audience. Mozart's life was hardly a barrel of laughs, yet the movie Amadeus was moving and full of life. I didn't walk out of the cinema during this film, but too many scenes in A Quiet Passion involved Emily and her family sitting in a very dark room spouting earnest and meaningless dialogue, like a particularly wooden 1940s radio play. And when there were lively scenes, they mostly involved someone dying, or Emily ranting to her sister, or being nasty to a stranger. You can't accuse Davies of sugar-coating Dickinson, like some biopic directors do. And Dickinson, admittedly, does seem to be a hard subject to portray. But it's such a shame the sunny early scenes descend into wrist-slashing gloom by the end of the film. Why couldn't Davies focus on the people Emily exchanged letters with? What about showing how her poems were saved after her death? Why weren't there scenes about how generations have been inspired by her work? She may have changed lives. Instead we get a turgid parlour piece that was so dim I thought I might be going blind. I kept expecting Will Ferrell to walk in and declare it all a spoof. But no luck.
Review of A Quiet Passion
