A QUIET PASSION (2016) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Terence Davies
Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Keith Carradine,
Joanna Bacon, Duncan Duff, Jodhi May
The quiet, passionate life of Emily Dickinson, from the time she left school in 1848 to her death at 55 in 1886. Dickinson spent just about all of that time - her whole adult life - in her family's home, living for years as a virtual recluse. She also turned out 1,800 poems, only ten of them, severely edited, published during her lifetime. Cynthia Nixon recites some of those poems in voiceover while playing Emily in this film. It's beautifully designed and composed and shot, but the script is literate to a fault, with characters exchanging perfectly formed sentences as if they were engaged in a contest to see who can score the most elegant rhetorical points. The actors do what they can, but it's hard to imagine real people talking that way, even if it is the 19th century and one of them is Emily Dickinson.
