Ian (Flash Review)I have zero experience with poetry so was hoping to gain insight into what made Emily Dickenson a literary icon. For some reason the director omitted the core middle part of her life. It focused on her childhood and her later years. What an odd way to scope this film. So you peer into her childhood as she wrestled with her faith and late in life as she was a stubborn, snarky and anti-social woman. What light was the director trying to showcase her in? The only insight into her poetry were some spliced in poetic narration moments. The film is plum full of sophisticated dialog, many quiet moments of contemplation and quality cinematography. There wasn't really much of a plot so you just watch time pass and several snippy conversations as Emily interacts with gentlemen suitors and potential publishers. Thus, I started to peek at my watch with 30min remaining. There was however, a really bad-ass time period transition from childhood to adulthood. The film needed a scope rethink.

dpo-19471 For a person who had such a dynamic inner life, "A Quiet Passion" certainly makes Emily Dickinson's existence seem dull as nails. The film moves at a snail's pace for far longer than necessary. I had to take breaks from watching it out of sheer tedium. Dark interiors and agonizingly slow scenes capture the outward appearance of a person whose 1,800 poems and thousands of letters reveal a far more humorous, spiritual, and animated individual.That Dickinson was unknown to the outside world during her own time is not surprising, given her introversion. That a contemporary biographical film of her life wasted so much time confirming that perspective, and so little time capturing her incredible genius, is a disappointment.Don't waste time and energy watching this film; read her poetry, her letters, and biographies for insight into this unique poet. Once freed from societal constraints and rules to produce "acceptable" poetry; Dickinson created with words a prism into her complex perspective of nature, life, death and God.

lasttimeisaw A biopic about the American poètesse maudite Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), directed by the British aesthete Terence Davies, A QUIET PASSION studiously bootstraps Dickinson's disconcerted inscape through family ties and her poetry, from a young gal (Bell), who repudiates religious insularity, to her grown-up stature (played by a dauntless Nixon, and the film features a transcendent aging-morphing CGI process) of a woman enthralled by independence and sisterhood shared with her younger sister Lavinia (a modest but benignly discerning appearance from the ever-absorbing Jennifer Ehle) and a common friend Vryling Buffum (Bailey, who constantly spouts her repartee with her haughty elocution which hardly justifies the sisters' fondness for her).Suffusing with Emily's own verses through Nixon's creaky voice, the words have a delicacy of a porcelain vase surmounted at the edge of a towering shelf, ready to embrace their perdition just by a single nudge, as in the antinomy between the two most distinctive themes of her creations: death and immortality. Emily, is a contradiction, during the tenor of her life descending into reclusive spinsterhood, she is recalcitrant in defying the subservience of an almighty being, but at the same time, it is as if she has made a pact with God, to abstain from all the mundane temptations (a magic moment occurs only in her imagination decked with a slow-motion flourish when a man seems to walk into her life) in exchange of a ceaseless fount of her inspiration, and the resultant suffering becomes her cross to bear. In the later stage of her life, when death snatches both her parents (played by Carradine and a lyrically sorrowful Bacon), and embittered cynicism starts to get the better of her unalloyed spirit, Emily's eccentricity can legitimately make one's hackles rise owing to Davies' uncompromising projection of her increasingly wayward deportment and whims, eschewing from being a hagiography, the film certifies that prickliness is as essential as poignancy in the character arc since no one is perfect, although Davies' methodology is perversely rough-and-ready in terms of emotional outpourings, but thankfully, poised by a gaunt Cynthia Nixon, her central performance proffers strong ballast for all the verbal lashing-out, bloody-minded confrontation and highfalutin melodrama, and her epileptic spasm can simply humble any of those spooky manifestations in the exorcism horror genre. A prestige period drama in its core festooned by a quaintly somber hue and ample classic accompaniments (whether diegetic or not), A QUIET PASSION is not an instant crowd-pleaser but a cerebral threnody of a flesh-and-blood individual, it might not invite all the audience to her (sometimes navel-gazing) poems, but it certainly triumphs in its sagacious dissection of a troubled soul, trying to find her peace with this cruel world.

cdcrb although most of the reviews are the same, I must point out the performance by Cynthia Nixon, as Emily Dickenson. it's spell binding and frightening at the same time. ms. Nixon is at the top of her game here and provides us with a character only bette davis could have delivered in the day. see this film for her. otherwise, it's hard going and quite down. not much reason to plunk down big bucks at the box office.