A Quiet Passion
Terence Davies is a filmmaker who always searches for time gone by. I don’t think he’s ever made a feature film set in the present day, unless you count his 2008 documentary about his beloved hometown of Liverpool, “Of Time and the City,” which was a present day from which he lamented the past. This is not to say that nostalgia is Davies’ thing. He looks backward to see the oppression suffered by especially his female characters.
Witness his tremendous 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” with Gillian Anderson giving what amounts to a near surgical performance as hypocrisy among New York City’s upper crust at the turn of the 20th century; or his 2011 “The Deep Blue Sea” (from Terence Rattigan), with Rachel Weisz trapped in a loveless marriage in post World War II Britain.
“A Quiet Passion,” his latest film, extends further back through history than any of its predecessors to mid 19th-century America this time, which makes three visits here for Davies. (His 1995 movie based on John Kennedy Toole’s novel “The Neon Bible” was set in 1940s Georgia.) Working from an original screenplay by Davies himself, “A Quiet Passion” concerns the life and work of poet Emily Dickinson, whose vast output went mostly unpublished in her lifetime.
The movie starts when young Emily (played by Emma Bell) stands silent in the middle of a schoolroom without chairs while her classmates move to either side according to whether or how deeply they desire “to come to God and be saved.” When asked how she can repent, Emily tells her teacher: “I am not even awakened yet.”
The initial days of Amherst seems quite dull. Emily spends her time with Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle), her youngest sister, and Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey), her best friend. They walk through gardens, have tea, trade barbs. Emily publishes a few sparse poems in a local journal owned by a friend of her fathers. There are suitors and marriages for other people. Emily is too outspoken, too uninterested, too Emily to do anything but be herself. And write, mostly in secret.
Davies does not see Dickinson as some kind of eccentric; indeed one feels that he strongly identifies with her, that his dedication to his portrait is spectacularly evident in every shot of this very unusual movie. For the first part of the film he presents his story and characters as tableaus, like something out of a silent picture; the characters speak stiffly and stand as if posing.
As the movie continues, though, touchingly evoking how certain events came to define America and its character particularly the Civil War began to touch the lives of the Dickinsons, and we hear more voiceover recitations of Emily’s work from Nixon (who reads about half of “A Quiet Passion”‘s script), the style becomes less constricted but still retains an unearthly quality.
Davies’ poetic mode isn’t simply attuned to Dickinson’s own; it illuminates it. Just as Dickinson’s poetic mode anticipated modernism by way of personal expression and an ear for idiosyncratic metaphor so acute it could seem like hallucination or clairvoyance while remaining fundamentally grounded in nature observation and religious faith (“All I ever knew put into me without asking my permission,” says Cynthia Nixon’s Emily at one point), so here does Davies’ cinematic style slip certain bonds and achieve an unquiet fluidity: The effect is remarkable.
And it finds its most exemplary expression its most grounded, and therefore heartbreaking in Nixon’s performance. Every actor in this movie is doing some of the finest work of his or her career; it’s hard to think of another contemporary film so densely packed with strong performances. But Nixon’s precision in portraying every particular mood of Emily’s for each individual scene calls for absolute specificity is simply otherworldly.
There are times in the life when she is racked by illness, or possessed by a seeming madness; her fury at the misbehavior of a family member late in the film, as she rages against what she sees as a failure of integrity, is chilling because Nixon makes the viewer see how much Emily is actually turning that rage back upon herself. Every single scene in the movie contains a performance revelation of almost equal power to those four sentences.
I will be very surprised if I see an American actor give a better performance than this this year.
“A Quiet Passion” does not have the romantic ache or agony that suffuses some of Davies’ other films (like “The Deep Blue Sea”); it does not mourn for what Emily Dickinson did not have. Rather it admires her for what she was, and what literary (and feminist) posterity made of her. And it invites us to take seriously her mode of thought and art; not just to take seriously but to revel, as much as one can revel in work that is simultaneously so austere and so rich. Like the movie itself.
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