The biopic is a difficult film to get right, all the more so when its subject is an artist whose significance was understood only after their death. The view from here – a vantage point that makes plain the chain of influence linking Vincent van Gogh to his inheritors, and Emily Dickinson to hers – complicates our perception of the lives of these individuals. It is hard to imagine that Dickinson had no inkling during her life that her work would foment and transform the very principle of poetry – easier to think that she did, that she suspected all along. It’s even harder to hold in mind that posthumous fame changes not a detail of the lived experience. Awfully, it is an afterlife to which all but the artist herself are invited.
To writer-director Terence Davies’s credit, he has not, with his latest film, fallen prey to the temptation to imbue the poet’s 55 years with a sense of building towards. On the contrary, Dickinson’s life – as Davies represents it – is conclusively end-stopped, and the latter half of it marred by her certainty that she will go to her grave unread. As a fan of Dickinson, Davies might have spared himself and us the discomfiting truth of her daily life by implying that she somehow chose it; that she paid with her imperfect present for posthumous renown.
Yet instead of making her a martyr, he and actor Cynthia Nixon give us not the world-shy mouse of popular imagination but a woman who is sociable, who bobs downstairs like a kangaroo to make a new friend of the spirited Miss Buffam. This Dickinson is alive in her time: profoundly mindful of its politics of gender, religion and secession; responsive to its literature; awake to and disposed to discuss the fact of being overlooked as a writer of verses. Like slant rhyme, she surprises, as when she smashes a plate on the edge of the table when her father complains it is dirty. She is outspoken, overfull of feeling (often on the brink of tears, moved by an aunt’s departure or for reasons less apparent) and frightened by mortality. Few biopics have achieved as full and rounded a subject as this one has.
Born in 1830, Dickinson saw fewer than 12 of her 1,775 (known) poems published. Davies’s film proposes – justly, I think – that this was partly a condition of her context, partly owing to her pride. Dickinson’s public recognition was prevented as much by the conservatism of publishers (the prevalent opinion that women ‘cannot create the permanent treasures of literature’, as the editor of the Springfield Republican states here), and a general unpreparedness, unrelated to gender, for the uncompromising character of her verses, as it was by Dickinson’s single-mindedness and her setting great store by ‘integrity’. From start to finish, A Quiet Passion finds proof of these qualities in Dickinson. Beginning with her withdrawal from women’s college because she ‘will not be forced to piety’ by its headmistress, the film encompasses the origins of some of the poet’s most important relationships, and two further withdrawals: her renouncing publication (‘the Auction/Of the Mind’ she would call it) and her retreat – in the later part of her life, which was crowded with losses and illnesses – deeper inside her father’s house.
Dickinson’s character is established primarily through lively dialogue, scripted by Davies, and secondarily through her poetry in the form of voiceover. (These are whole poems, not odds and ends, read empathetically by Nixon.) There is a third way: an excursion into the poet’s imagination, an erotic reverie in which a man slowly climbs the stairs to her room. The synergy between the traditional song on the film’s soundtrack, and the phosphorescing flowers at the foot of the stairs, Florian Hoffmeister’s languid camera and the intensity of Nixon’s expression makes this the film’s most powerful scene. The yearning for intimacy it expresses is almost unbearably moving, being at odds with the way the poet puts distance between herself and others at this stage of her life.
Physical remoteness and effulgent imagination are also the concerns of a recent biopic by another filmmaker from the north of England. (To borrow, anachronistically, the words of Wendy Cope, bloody biopics about women writers are like bloody buses: you wait for years, then two or three appear.) Broadcast on British television at the end of 2016, around the time that Davies’s film was initially to be released, Sally Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible – about Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë – is, as its title indicates, A Quiet Passion’s twin.
More or less contemporaries (Emily Brontë, whose name and novel are mentioned more than once in A Quiet Passion, died when Dickinson was 18), Dickinson and the Brontës had more in common than simply the trials of publication. Wainwright and Davies take like approaches to these writers’ lives, each filmmaker relaying the complexity not only of the subjects’ economic and social situations, but also of their practical and emotional accommodation of them. Most interestingly, both films depict the loss of a relative, and in each the treatment of disease and death is direct, unflinching. The material losses these women suffer body forth losses of a non-material kind. They gesture towards the dispossession of something that never was theirs to be taken, and is difficult to show on film: cultural opportunity. Its refusal is more painful in A Quiet Passion, Dickinson harder hit. The Brontës had each other at least, though even this had its pitfalls, namely the conventionality that moved Charlotte to demean her sisters’ authorial integrity, blocking the republication of Anne’s second novel and writing a jaundiced foreword to Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Wainwright’s intimation of the pervasiveness of the dominant culture – the risk of cultural integration, of assimilation by the literary establishment – is among her film’s many merits. That risk came knocking at the Brontë parsonage, just at it called for Dickinson at Amherst. It was the Emilys who denied it entrance and stood their ground, adamant that their writing not be raked or interfered with. Resisting assimilation may not look like much; these films say it is.
That both productions chose to have replica houses built is not incidental. A Quiet Passion has its Dickinson Homestead, To Walk Invisible its Haworth parsonage – places whose comfort and containment formed these women and ministered to their creative and spiritual lives. As Virginia Woolf wrote after visiting the parsonage in 1904: ‘Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell.’
By the conclusion of A Quiet Passion, we are left in no doubt as to the kind of woman Emily Dickinson was, or how deeply she felt. And yet she remains a mystery. Davies appears not to have wanted to manage his subject, to be overbearing and work her like clay on his wheel. It isn’t for us, he seems to say, to see with her eyes or walk in her shoes. After all, to be a poet is not, in all cases, to wish to be transparent. Not all poetry is confessional, not even all of it personal.
Conveying to a publisher how his adjustments to her punctuation had galled her (‘It feels like an attack’), Dickinson explains – with a brusqueness characteristic of the older poet – that there is a difference between ‘clarity’ and ‘obviousness’. Davies grasps this distinction. A Quiet Passion has all the wished-for clarity – of vision and of character – but it is not so certain of its subject as to enclose her and divest her of what she prized most: her soul’s independence.
Thirza Wakefield, Sight and Sound, May 2017
A Quiet Passion
Directed by: Terence Davies
©: A Quiet Passion Ltd, Hurricane Films
Production Companies: Hurricane Films, Potemkino, Scope Pictures
Supported by: Screen Flanders, Enterprise Flanders, Flanders Audiovisual Fund
With support from: Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government via Scope Invest, Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government via Scope Invest
Presented by: WeatherVane Productions, Screen Flanders
Executive Producers: Andrea Gibson, Jason Van Eman, Ross Marroso, Ben McConley, Ron Moring, Jason Moring, Geneviève Lemal, Alain-Gilles Viellevoye, Dominic Ianno, Stuart Pollok
Co-executive Producer: Mary MacLeod
Produced by: Roy Boulter, Solon Papadopoulos
Co-producers: Peter De Maegd, Tom Hameeuw
Line Producers: Paul de Ruijter, Michael Bowes
Associate Producers: Margaret Appleby, Rob Deege
Project Manager - Potemkino: Lize Lefaible
Production Co-ordinators: June Beeckmans, Cathy Vlasuk
Financial Controller: Nick Stanley
Location Managers: Tim Janssen, Oliver Amerigian
Post-production Supervisor: Meg Clark
1st Assistant Directors: Johan Ivens, Lynn d’Angona
2nd Assistant Directors: Thuline De Brauwer, Lisandra Soto
Casting: John Hubbard, Ros Hubbard
Written by: Terence Davies
Director of Photography: Florian Hoffmeister
Camera Operator: Donald McIntosh
1st Assistant Camera: Rupert Hornstein, Darryl Byrne
2nd Assistant Camera: Stefan Bruylants, Kate Castro
Digital Imaging Technician Supervisor: Niels Christensen
Gaffers: Dieter van der Eecken, Jesse Goldberg
Key Grips: Bo Molderez, Warren Weberg
[Stills] Photographer: Johan Voets
Visual Effects by: The Fridge
Special Effects: Eric De Wulf, Peter Soete, Koen Luypaert
Edited by: Pia Di Ciaula
Production Designer: Merijin Sep
Art Directors: Toon Mariën, Katha Seidman
Set Decorator: Ilse Willocx
Costume Designer: Catherine Marchand
Costume Supervisor: Deborah Newhall
Wardrobe Supervisor: Regina Van Eijden
Make-up Designers: Fabienne Adam, Michelle Van Brussel
Make-up Department Head: Joe Rossi
Key Make-up: Stephanie Stachow
Hair Designers: Frank van Wolleghem, Evie Hamels
Hair Department Head: Jean Henry
Key Hairdresser: Emma Rotondi
Titles: Company 3
Orchestra: Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra
Pianists: Helen Krizos, Joshua Cole
Conductor: Ernst van Tiel
Music Supervisor: Ian Neil
Recording Engineer: Stephen Guy, David Coyle
Sound Mixers: Johan Maertens, Kevin Parker
Re-recording Mixer: Paul Cotterell
Supervising Sound Editor: Srdjan Kurpjel
Cast
Cynthia Nixon (Emily Dickinson)
Jennifer Ehle (Lavinia Dickinson, ‘Vinnie’)
Jodhi May (Susan Gilbert)
Catherine Bailey (Vryling Buffam)
Emma Bell (young Emily)
Duncan Duff (Austin Dickinson)
Keith Carradine (Edward Dickinson, father)
Sara Louise Vertongen (Miss Lyon)
Rose Williams (young Vinnie)
Benjamin Wainwright (young Austin)
Marieke Bresseleers (Jenny Lind)
David Van Bouwel (concert hall pianist)
Annette Badland (Aunt Elizabeth)
Steve Dan Mills (Dr Holland)
Joanna Bacon (mother)
Daniel Vereenooghe (carriage driver)
Michel Delanghe (carriage driver assistant)
Maurice Cassiers (photographer)
Miles Richardson (pastor)
Luc Devos (homestead pianist)
Barney Glover (dancing soldier)
Verona Verbakel (Margaret, maid)
Yasmin Dewilde (Maggie, maid)
Turlough Convery (Thomas, butler)
Daan Cools, Eve Cools (Dickinson baby)
Eric Loren (Reverend Wadsworth)
Simone Milsdochter (Mrs Wadsworth)
Tom Kemp (minister)
Ross MacDonald (Mr Wilder)
Trevor Cooper (Samuel Bowles)
Stefan Menaul (Mr Emmons)
Bert Bancquaert (looming man)
Richard Wells (doctor)
Noémie Schellens (Mabel Loomis Todd)
Maarten Ketels (Mr Todd)
Barry Roberts (funeral hearse driver)
UK 2016©
125 mins
Digital
With thanks to
James Dowling, John Taylor, Dan Copley,
Sophie Smith, Edge Hill University
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