This is a biopic of American poet Emily Dickinson starting from her school girl (Emma Bell) days alone challenging the religious dogma of the teachers. She (Cynthia Nixon) and her sister Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle) are permitted by their father (Keith Carradine) to be free-thinking. He allows her to write her poems. During the Civil War and despite the family's anti-slavery sentiments, her father does not permit her brother Austin to fight. As they grow older, Emily becomes bitter and suffering from seizures. Her writing is unrecognized for the most part until after her death.

It's an interesting character study although it does not intrigue as a narrative. She's one way and does not change over time. It's mostly intellectual with moments of highly charged anger. There may be a better way into the character if the movie concentrated on one romantic love or the lack thereof. There are side characters who come in with that potential. The movie needs to zero on one of them. This is good for the art house but not for the general audience.

"A Quiet Passion" from 2016 is a beautifully photographed and produced film about Emily Dickinson, here played by Cynthia Nixon. Some may be more familiar with the old Julie Harris vehicle about Dickenson, The Belle of Amherst, which she performed on stage.

As a young woman, Dickinson attended a female seminary but ultimately returned home to her family. She was very opinionated and rigid in her beliefs and considered eccentric. She became more and more reclusive and later on refused to leave her bedroom.

She wrote beautiful poetry, much of which was discovered after her death.

Dickinson was a troubled woman, preoccupied with death and no doubt suffered from depression which worsened over the years. She may have also been agoraphobic.

The film, written and directed by Terence Davies was overly long, slow, and boring, done in a pretentious manner. Someone who saw it the same time as I did described it as "starched." It did not draw in this viewer.

The acting was good, with Nixon doing a fine job as Emily and Jennifer Ehle, whom many remember from the wonderful Pride & Prejudice some years ago, gave a lovely performance as her sister Lavinia. Keith Carradine played their father; he was excellent and inspired casting.

"A Quiet Passion" was obviously a labor of love for Davies and for Nixon, and much care was taken with it. For me, it wasn't energized or accessible enough to truly enjoy, which is a shame, as it was treated too preciously.

I think if you're at the least an English major or minor in college, as I was, you're bound to come across the poetry of Emily Dickinson in a class or two. Her work is profound and terribly moving, as words flow out in such a way that you can feel the depths of feeling stretching through a nervous system that may have only just been wracked by fits and that the questioning of what GOD is or what LIFE and DEATH are have no choice but to be sussed out. There are also love poems too, or at least poems sorting out what those feelings might amount to, or what it means to be at the foot of the stairs looking at someone and not being able to, or feeling like, or whatever, going down. There's a lot of the pain, but also the joy and reverie, in connection or those possibilities in her work.

The question then for Terence Davies is: what about the woman? There is some joy here, or even small chirpings of humor in that reserved 19th century comedy-of-manners way at times in the first two-thirds... and then the last third is among the saddest things I've seen unfold in a very long time. What makes A Quiet Passion convincing is that Davies and his crew and cast commit to it all, and his style is one of patience with his compositions and movements of the frame - let's take a little time moving across faces, for example, listening to a piece of music, or let's make sure we don't too much when we can see the sum total of emotions an actor is expressing in listening (or, as a character may do that's not Dickinson at times, only half listen, or hear what they want to hear, as was the reserved 19th century small town way).

There's also a truly amazing moment of cinema here that stands out like to the point of that phrase "it's a moving painting, man!" There's one sequence where Emily is by herself in her room, as she often is, but imagining in a moment of what the title might suggest in pure, dream-like form, put to a piece of orchestral/sung music, I can't remember which now but it is full of wanting and yet sorrow somewhere in its chords and vocals. At first we see her surrounded by darkness as Davies' camera pushes in slowly on her. Then it dissolves so seamlessly that it might as well be pushing in to dolly into her brain, and then we get a shot of a door opening as a figure is standing in silhouette, total black, with the background behind him just lit enough so that it has the color of what one might see in a 19th century watercolor painting. The figure then moves slowly, like a ghost only more naturally, and then a shot of him ascending the stairs, and then finally back to Dickinson in her room as the camera pans back. God, that is astonishing cinema!

There's a good deal of this film that may be... full of talk for people. Oddly enough I think if it were a foreign language film, one with English subtitles for the art-houses where this is programmed largely (if this ever plays in a cineplex I'll expect Fate of the Furious at the Angelika soon enough),it might have come off in a way that isn't... hard to get into at first. Characters talk how they should for the period, which is fine, and yet for those first ten or so minutes you have to adjust to the cadences and how people enunciate certain words. But once Cynthia Nixon comes in as Dickinson - there's a wonderful moment where, through how digital technology can work in a surprising way, we see the characters age before our very eyes posing for photos - things pick up and she has an especially good grasp of the character and the clothes and world she's in. Matter of fact, Cynthia Nixon is wildly good - she is so impressive throughout this film that I almost wish Davies didn't have to cut away from her face to show reaction shots of the other actors (and she certainly has great players to work off from like Jennifer Ehle and Keith Carradine as a stern father).

It's in the last third that things become so raw that one may almost feel so uncomfortable and disturbed sitting there in the theater or at home (but the theater makes it larger and more direct in its effect). Dickinson, as some may know (it's what she's mostly known for, it's what I knew vaguely about her before going in, thankfully the movie showed much more as a carefully constructed biopic should),died at 56, but some may think she died of suicide. Nope - as Dickinson was likely ahead of her time in some respects as a feminist thinker and as someone questioning one's relationship with God and religion, she was a product of her times as far as medical science; one wonders if she could've been treated or even cured of her kidney disease, but whatever the case it crippled her, though before this she still rarely left her room (her father's death, I think the film subtly suggests, wrecked her in some way she couldn't fully comprehend),and the last stretch of the film we see this lovely, often happy woman become wretched and depressed and unable to control how she talks and feels... and might we be in that same position? A Quiet Passion is a soulful, deeply moving experience in artistic cinema; one may also say it's "important" feeling about it, but why carp? If it's like eating your vegetables in a sense, what if I sometimes like a heaping plate of broccoli or cauliflower? 9.5/10