“A Quiet Passion” is the Great Biopic Emily Dickinson Deserves

Emily Dickinson is my favourite poet apart from Shakespeare, and, in my estimation, also happens to be the greatest poet beside Shakespeare. The differences between the Bard and the Belle of Amherst are multitudinous and immense, but they are connected in how I see each of them by two common traits: a Herculean, colossal cognitive struggle with (and, in some ways, triumph over) the cosmos, which marks the distinct originality and greatness of their poetry; and the shockingly (yet, somehow, aptly) minute amount we know of each of their outer lives, as well as the regrettable absence of a chronicle of their monumental inner lives. The character of Shakespeare has already been featured in a small handful of films, sometimes not totally in earnest, but Terence Davies’s assuredly masterful and astoundingly emotional biopic A Quiet Passion features the first appearance of Dickinson on the screen. And, as befits the greatest poet of her continent and one of the greatest in the language, the film is an exquisite and unforgettable masterpiece that — I note bitterly as awards season is underway — has not received the recognition it certainly merits. If it had been released in theatres in South Africa last year, I may well have placed it right at the top of my list of favourite films of the year.

I have only seen one other film by Davies, his first, Distant Voices, Still Lives, from 1988. If that film and this one, his latest, are anything to go by, he is undoubtedly one of the great artists of the time, and has also been unduly neglected and forgotten in the popular media. I had at least hoped we would hear of some or other Best Actress nomination for Cynthia Nixon, who plays Emily Dickinson in the film, and in doing so gives one of the most intense and insightful biopic performances in recent years; alas, the film has been unjustly sidelined. Yet, as frustrating as this may be for those who worked on it, this suits the story of the determined artist who craved acknowledgement and vindication and never got it while she was alive.

The Year in Movies – 2017

This is a movie blog, but a calendar year in movies (an arbitrary divisor used for ease of comparison) can always be contrasted with, and, more often, related to the calendar year in general. In 2014, we noted a new rise in protest and resistance action around the world, spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement that began in America in that year. At the end of 2014, Ava DuVernay’s magnificent biopic Selma was released, which not only depicted a subject similar to the issues concerning the movement, but reflected a similar temper of outraged defiance and dignified opposition. The film was duly lauded, in both apt aesthetic and trite journalistic terms, and had a moderate showing at the Oscars. But, other than distilling and sharply appreciating the substance of the matter at hand, it did nothing to aid any of the protest movements surrounding it. Movies can’t change the world — art in the general shouldn’t try — but artists aim for its greater truths and meanings.

At the end of 2015, in my movie round-up, I noted the mounting energies of resistance and opposition both locally and globally: the student funding crisis, the South African education crisis, the international refugee crisis, the climate change crisis, fanaticist terror attacks, rising movements of fascism and overt racism, a growing distrust in an increasingly consumerist global media industry, and widening gaps of inequality. 2016 — whose political concerns were not enumerated on my blog post to end off that year — seemed to many like a tipping point in many of these issues, and the fierce observation and commentary on movie releases since then by social media users around the world has directly taken them into account. More explicitly than ever (and helpfully emphasised by the Oscar envelope mix-up), the widespread recognition of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight over narrower, more backward-facing works was political at least as much as it was aesthetic. This year, Hollywood was the epicentre of an eye-widening and heartening blowback against the systematic abuse of working women. Some of the allegations of sexual misconduct arising from Hollywood were shocking (though many were sickeningly unsurprising), but nothing about the predators’ actions was special or exceptional. These difficulties exist and thrive in every industry, and it’s almost necessary that an industry that exists to reflect and perceive the society at large is the one that exposed so ubiquitous a problem.

What to See This Weekend: The Struggle

“Malcolm X” (Spike Lee, 1992)

Available on iTunes; on DVD.

Spike Lee’s biopic of the civil rights activist and Muslim minister Malcolm X is based in large part on his autobiography. I noted on this blog that James Baldwin had written an earlier treatment of Malcolm X’s life for film, which was developed into the screenplay for Lee’s film. Having never read the autobiography nor Baldwin’s treatment (nor the versions in between that and the final script), I couldn’t say how much of the film comes from either source. Nor could I say, now having seen the film, how much of the stuff of the film itself comes from Spike Lee and his actual thoughts, feelings, and artistic impulses, and how much comes from what Spike Lee thought ought to be one’s thoughts, feelings, and heavily wrought artistic representations of these. Malcolm X displays an undeniable cinematic artistry, but only in flashes; although the film may seem like it’s set out like a textbook, or pseudo-testimony, and made not out of a drive for artistic creation but an assertive, unambiguous, even peremptory account of Malcolm X’s life and work, Lee’s distinctive style works to keep his film falling into the deadening craters of other Oscarisable biopics (think of Gandhi, Shine, Out of Africa, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, and the rest).

Lee seems determined to include as much of Malcolm X’s life as his distributors would allow in the film; many episodes are enacted in what feels like their real-time full length. The comparison between this and another, far greater recent biopic is striking: in his movie about Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies keeps his telling elliptical, choosing a few distinctive moments — some of them even partly or mostly fictional — in Dickinson’s life in the foreground to suggest a rich and multiplicitous background. Of course, Lee couldn’t have done the same here, because of the very real cultural and political risks in leaving too much of Malcolm X’s story to interpretation, or even of refracting it too sharply through one’s own interpretation. Unfortunately, however, this ostensibly faithful account occludes a probing, questioning, curious, ambivalent, ambiguous, or polysemous attitude to the content, and so precludes a highly nuanced or inflected filming of it. And, in an oblique way, it works against Lee’s intentions: when an artist resorts to hard assertions, especially in an apparent effort to set the record straight, and especially in a form derived from and assimilating to fiction, it’s particularly difficult to trust in its veracity, even (or, perhaps, especially) when it’s demonstrated that the narrative is mostly fact-based. The facts don’t speak for themselves, and an artist is in store for deep pitfalls when he presumes that they might.