Critics reviews

The light in A Quiet Passion is as clean as snow, sifting through lace curtains; flickering fires give rooms the dark, warm varnish of oil paintings. But the film's language is even more luminous and richly colored than its images. Terence Davies's screenplay about the life of Emily Dickinson (the birdlike, astonishing Cynthia Nixon) is dense and dazzling, rigorous and subtle. The ritualistic stateliness of his camerawork is balanced by the bracing speed of his dialogue.

Davies's film owes much to Nixon's performance, and to Dickinson's poetry, read quite beautifully by Nixon in recurring voiceover. For the glorious filmmaking, though, he can surely take credit. There are breathtaking shots and sequences throughout—working, as the movie wears on, in an increasingly confined setting, he uses cast shadows and intrusions of sunlight through windows to define the home that becomes Emily's refuge and prison.

The film fits snugly among Davies's (indeed, quiet) masterpieces for the way it wrings the sublime from the strained confines of everyday life, refusing the luxury of easy liberation on either side of the screen. By the time Dickinson asks her sister, Vinni (Jennifer Ehle), "Why has the world become so ugly?," this tender and heartbreaking film has taught us better than to expect an answer.

Davies builds on the contrast between the increasingly suffocating space of Dickinson's bedroom, which once her illness worsened (she suffered from the kidney disease Bright's) she rarely left, by engaging with the expansiveness of her inner life. A Quiet Passion captures, in its form and tone, the torrid nature of her yearning.

The film is about a famous poet, but it's also about genius as singular and isolating, its main character burning so bright it sometimes aches to spend time in her company.

Davies' script complements Dickinson's poetry, which is either read in voiceover or cleverly integrated into a scene (she reads Poem 260, of "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" fame, to her baby nephew upon meeting him for the first time), though it's the witty banter, mostly invented by Davies with the writer's letters as inspiration, that steals the show, revealing Dickinson as the furtive revolutionary she was.

I fear now that I'm making the film sound like a drag, but it's exactly the opposite—it is funny, frequently effervescent, and walks a tonal tightrope that lets us sympathize deeply with Dickinson's isolation even as we may blanch at the rigidity and orneriness it produces. Much of Davies's success in this is due to Nixon, whose Emily is one of the great screen performances in recent years.

Cynthia Nixon is an absolute marvel in Terence Davies' must-see biopic—one of my favorites of the year—portraying Emily Dickinson. She colors the poet as the sharp-minded, sharp-tongued, difficult, loving, private, stubborn genius I imagine she really was.

When Davies imagines Austin reading the editorial aloud, he makes it an act of malice. But this dour image... also becomes a charge from which Davies has to defend himself... To show that his movie won't blur under "a mist of tears," he needs to give flavor, color, liveliness, and energy to the lonely, miserable situations he evokes. The burden of pulling off this tonal maneuver ultimately falls less on Davies than on Nixon, who quickly becomes the movie's center of light, heat, and power.

There's little more solemn and sanctimonious than the great-person biopic, but Terence Davies's "A Quiet Passion," about Emily Dickinson, breaks the mold. The new movie, which stars Cynthia Nixon, lets a radiant, riotous, insolent humor illuminate the self-imposed confines of Dickinson's family circle and the boundaries of conventional thought and behavior that reinforced her sense of isolation.

Davies doesn't break the rules of biopics (or, for that matter, period pictures) so much as he operates independently of them, neither bowing to the genre's usual dramatic satisfactions nor really showing much awareness of them. It's a film made in the image of Dickinson and her poetry, in other words: starkly original, but without much show of fuss.

As the movie continues, and certain events that came to define America and its character touch the lives of the Dickinsons, and we hear more of Emily's work in voiceover, the movie's style becomes less constricted, more fluid, but still retains an unearthly quality. Just as Dickinson's poetic mode of personal expression and ear for idiosyncratic metaphor anticipated modernism, so here does Davies' cinematic style slip certain bonds and achieve an unquiet fluidity. The effect is remarkable.