Review of A Quiet Passion (2016) by Jeff O — 22 Jun 2017

I have no idea why this movie got such a high critic rating. It is honestly the most poorly written movie I have seen in years.

Let me start by saying that I love period pieces, and especially period pieces about real people. I love Emily Dickinson's poetry. I was very much looking forward to this movie.

But this script is seriously godawful. It reads like something a film student who doesn't know much about history would write, and whose ideas about the 19th century don't rise above knowing that women had a hard time of it, and that there was slavery. It is a period piece that doesn't seem at all interested in understanding the period it is set in. Dickinson comes off as a brave rebel with somewhat modern ideas about feminism and religion, and who is constantly being silenced and rebuked by men and religious people. This is not true to the real person, and even if it was, it is delivered in such a shallow way that the effect it achieves comes across as neither brave nor intelligent.

Let's also talk about religion: religion formed a big part of Dickinson's upbringing, intellectual life, and family life. It was all around her, and she herself had a rather ambivalent relationship with it. In the very first scene we are treated with the headmaster of Holyoke rebuking her for rejecting God's salvation, in a scene that immediately suggests that we are about to see a movie long treatment of religion written by someone who does not understand religious people. This would be bearable if religion only made a few appearances in the movie, but it is discussed in almost every scene, where we see humorless New Englanders gasp sanctimoniously at Emily's irreverence, which she displays by asking thoughtful questions, none of which actually start interesting conversations.

And this brings me to the worst part of the movie: the dialogue. It is horrendous. It is as if the screenwriter read an Oscar Wilde play and thought, "yeah, that, but in New England, and with Emily Dickinson." The banter is supposed to be clever and deep, delivered in 19th century vocabulary with Wilde-esque irony. But 1) only about half the lines that the writer clearly thinks are clever actually are clever, and 2) they are delivered so rapidly that none of the dialogue seems real or thoughtful at all. You get the sense that these are actors trying to get through a long and cumbersome, badly written script. I love clever Victorian banter in a movie, and this movie thinks it is delivering this. It is not.

Finally, the movie fundamentally misunderstands Dickinson, choosing instead to make her the kind of woman that a modern progressive mind can nod approvingly at. The movie presents her as a kind of feminist, biting back at condescending men and not lowering her standards for love, choosing instead to be her own woman than be subordinate to a man. The real life Dickinson had a lot of baggage from an unrequited crush, which we see briefly (portrayed as much later in life than the real Dickinson experienced it) to not much effect other than earning a stern rebuke from her sister because the object of her crush is already married. The movie also portrays her a either irreligious or perhaps a closet atheist; the real Dickinson was quite religious, although in her poems she spoke candidly about her ambivalence about many Christian themes, including eternal life and the contemplation of death, which she thought about a lot. In short, the movie seems to believe the adage that well-behaved women never make history, so Dickinson must not have been well-behaved. I think it fundamentally gets her wrong.

The one saving grace of the movie is the voiced-over appearance of so many of her poems, which are beautiful, and through them, the real Dickinson shines through. If the movie had left out 75% of the dialogue and just let her poems do most of the talking, I think it would have shown us a more true and worthwhile story of the Moth of Amherst.