A Quiet Passion

TERENCE DAVIES
Belgium, UK, 2016
126 minutes, Color
Official website

A new film by Terence Davies is always something to celebrate. The great British director of Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The House of Mirth is himself a poet of human emotions, so when he takes on a biography of Emily Dickinson, the results are enthralling, but quietly so. The Dickinson household of Amherst, under a stern but loving patriarch who intones "don't be banal, Emily" and a melancholic mother, is nevertheless a home for humor and even gender debates among three whip-smart grown children who never want to move out and never do. Using the anonymity of night, Emily writes her poetry. In Davies's signature slow pans and ethereal window shots time doesn't march so much as spread, and with time and tragedy and neglect, the poet thrives, the soul withers. Posterity, Emily knows, is as comfortless as God. Cynthia Nixon embodies Dickinson, supported by a marvelous cast.—Judy Bloch