Storyline
The story of American poet Emily Dickinson from her early days as a young schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist.
Cast: Cynthia Nixon -
Emily Dickinson
Jennifer Ehle -
Vinnie Dickinson
Duncan Duff -
Austin Dickinson
Keith Carradine -
Father (Edward Dickinson)
Jodhi May -
Susan Gilbert
Joanna Bacon -
Mother (Emily Norcross)
Catherine Bailey -
Vryling Buffam
Emma Bell -
Young Emily Dickinson
Benjamin Wainwright -
Young Austin Dickinson
Annette Badland -
Aunt Elizabeth
Rose Williams -
Young Vinnie Dickinson
Noémie Schellens -
Mabel Loomis Todd
Miles Richardson -
Pastor
Eric Loren -
Reverend Wadsworth
Stefan Menaul -
Mr. Emmons
Country: UK, Belgium
Language: English
Release Date: 3 Jan 2016
Filming Locations: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
Box Office Details
Budget: €6,900,000
(estimated)
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Quotes:
User Review
Author:
Rating: 10/10
Emily Dickinson isn't the easiest subject for a feature-length biopic.
True, she is the greatest female poet in the English language, maybe
even in world literature. But her life was uneventful in the extreme.
She never married and probably died a virgin. Her love affairs were
conducted by correspondence. She became reclusive as she got older,
donning a white dress, rarely leaving home, and holding conversations
through doorways. She wrote poetry—a kind of literature appealing only
to a tiny minority of readers and not amenable to film adaptation.
Moreover, with a few exceptions, her poems are difficult: she
specialized in extreme mental states and thorny intellectual paradoxes.
And she died in complete obscurity—it's only by good fortune that the
1800 poems she wrote still exist. At her death the vast majority of
them existed only in a single handwritten manuscript and could easily
have been consigned to flame as the ramblings of an eccentric spinster.
So Dickinson's biography hardly conforms to the typical story arc or
dramatic requirements of the average American film. Until now, the most
successful dramatization of the life of this poet who lived an interior
existence, both literally and figuratively, was the one-woman play The
Belle of Amherst, which needless to say emphasized her isolation.
Terence Davies's film knows and accepts all this, yet remembers that
Dickinson in her own time was not a great poet, except perhaps only in
the farthest reaches of her own imagination. Instead of a lonely
genius, Davies conjures up a Dickinson who was very much a social
being, even if her interactions were largely restricted to her family.
Cynthia Nixon's Emily is a flawed, totally plausible, and deeply
sympathetic woman of her time.
This is a brilliant film in the way it exploits the resources of the
medium. The performances are universally excellent, and the dialogue is
as witty as it must have been among clever Emily and her circle. Davies
captures the claustrophobic interiors and repressed souls of still-
Puritan mid-19th-century small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. The editing
and pacing are superb, as for example in a slow 360 degree pan around
the Dickinson sitting room that begins and ends on Emily's face.
But it's also brilliant in the way that it interprets Dickinson's life.
How did the Civil War impact her Amherst domesticity? Why did she wear
a white dress? What did she feel when her brother Austin, who lived
with his wife Susan next door, started conducting an adulterous affair
in her own living room? How did she feel to be dying slowly and
horribly of kidney disease knowing that her poetry (her "Letter to the
World" as she put it) was almost totally unread? Did the hope that
she'd be appreciated by posterity reconcile her to her fate? Nixon's
Emily behaves in each case as a human being would, making her
predicament painful to watch. But it's strangely exhilarating too—we
watch knowing that Dickinson's "Letter" has most definitely been
delivered.
The film is slow-paced and developed as a series of vignettes. There's
quite a lot of poetry in voice-over. At no point does it pander to
21st- century sensibilities. It will not be to the taste of the
majority of the cinema-going public. Nor will many Dickinson cultists
enjoy it, as they often prefer to idealize or mythologize her rather
than think of her as a flesh-and-blood woman. But as a plausible
biography of one of America's greatest poets, this film is nothing
short of a triumph.
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