Terence Davies and Cynthia Nixon bring poet Emily Dickinson to startling life in a biographical film which, like its subject, is conventional on the surface but fiercely individual underneath.

The teenage Emily Dickinson, daughter of a well-to-do New England lawyer and his invalid wife, leaves her over-zealous school branded as a religious ‘no-hoper’. Back at home, she strikes a bargain with her father to stay at home and spend a portion of her time writing poetry…

As far as anyone can tell, the life of Emily Dickinson was a very uneventful one, and so in some ways it is unexpected for a biographical film to show it quite so chronologically, taking the poet from her late teens to her death. This seems particularly so for a director like Terence Davies, whose acclaimed early films DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988) and THE LONG DAY CLOSES (1992) use an impressionistic approach to their autobiographical material. However, it is perhaps the very uneventful nature of her life — what she herself calls her ‘routine’ — that makes this work so well here: as as friends move away and family members die over the course of the years, we are able to see how Emily turns in on herself, becoming increasingly tetchy and eccentric with her siblings and even male admirers.

… religious faith, the importance of family, the yearning for romantic love …

At the Q&A after the CFF screening, the director accepted points made by Dickinson scholars in the audience that this was one version out of many interpretations of her, since — despite the numerous biographies written about her, a large number of which Davies read in preparation for making the film — frustratingly little is known for sure about her life. Thus his screenplay concentrates on what interests him most: questions of religious faith, the importance of family, the yearning for romantic love. The speculation that Dickinson was gay, for instance, had no bearing on Davies’ approach, although her relationship with the oddly-named Vryling Buffam, played with elegant brio by Catherine Bailey, does have something of a one-sided crush about it. (Davies confessed in the Q&A that he knew nothing about the real Miss Buffam, and made her so vivaciously witty because anyone with a name like that was bound to be fun.)

A QUIET PASSION has many of Davies’ trademark touches, such as evocative music cues, precise camera movements (including a couple of achingly slow 360-degree pans) and subtle shifts of lighting. In particular, the final sequence, which uses the poem ‘Because I could not stop for death’ — the work that, the director says, first introduced him to Dickinson’s poetry — feels like Davies at his most characteristic, with its haunting orchestral music (courtesy of another unappreciated, innovative New Englander, Charles Ives), hieratically posed groups of people and lingering overhead shots which combine grandeur with fine textural detail. Given the director’s pedigree, it goes without saying that the film is ravishing to look at.

Cynthia Nixon delivers an Emily who is entirely convincing…

One interesting innovation here is the method by which his characters age, as they sit in a photographer’s studio. In the case of Emily’s stern but tolerant father, his features imperceptibly change so that within a few minutes he has aged a decade or more, while for the teenage Dickinson children each face morphs into the actor who will play the role for the rest of the film. The computer techniques used for this are unusual for Davies, whose screenplays are usually too precise and detailed for CGI to play a major part, but the grace with which these metamorphoses are achieved is entirely characteristic of his work.

Another element that seems different is the freedom of the acting. Davies’ legendary visual control over his work has sometimes relegated the performers to little more than models, but that is far from the case here. Davies the screenwriter must take some credit here, as his words, after a slightly stilted start, achieve an often aphoristic panache which allows the actors to be sharp, charming and funny, despite the melancholy nature of much of the narrative.

Naturally, despite the predictably reliable support by Keith Carradine as Emily’s father, Jennifer Ehle as her sister and the rest of a largely British cast, the film stands or falls by the performance of Cynthia Nixon — still best known, baffingly enough, as Miranda in SEX IN THE CITY — and she delivers an Emily who is entirely convincing in her intelligence, her fury, her self-disgust, her kindness and her honesty. Indeed, the only possible fault to find with Nixon’s performance is that the film occasionally seems designed to showcase just how marvellous an actor she is.

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