A Quiet Passion

2016
6.4| 2h5m| en
Details

The story of American poet Emily Dickinson from her early days as a young schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist.

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Reviews

Scanialara You won't be disappointed!
Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
SnoopyStyle This is a biopic of American poet Emily Dickinson starting from her school girl (Emma Bell) days alone challenging the religious dogma of the teachers. She (Cynthia Nixon) and her sister Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle) are permitted by their father (Keith Carradine) to be free-thinking. He allows her to write her poems. During the Civil War and despite the family's anti-slavery sentiments, her father does not permit her brother Austin to fight. As they grow older, Emily becomes bitter and suffering from seizures. Her writing is unrecognized for the most part until after her death.It's an interesting character study although it does not intrigue as a narrative. She's one way and does not change over time. It's mostly intellectual with moments of highly charged anger. There may be a better way into the character if the movie concentrated on one romantic love or the lack thereof. There are side characters who come in with that potential. The movie needs to zero on one of them. This is good for the art house but not for the general audience.
Red_Identity I wasn't really sure what to expect from this. Biopics of very important, historical figures usually are dry and very formulaic. The great thing about this film is that it's so sensitively written and directed. It doesn't feel the need to give any theatrics, and the same goes to the performers. Everyone here shines, but the film belongs to Cynthia Nixon. A performance that feels completely genuine and authentic, and it's full of nuances and little mannerisms that help us form an idea of Emily Dickinson. A lot of unknown about the poet so the film isn't trying to claim that it's completely accurate, but in terms of the character it created, Nixon brings her to life wonderfully. It's an incredible performance.
The_late_Buddy_Ryan Terence Davies, a director who specializes in period settings, dimly lit interiors and intimate family dramas, seems like the perfect match for his protagonist here, who rarely left the grounds of her family home (the location for the film's exterior scenes) and was known to her Amherst neighbors as "The Myth." Davies has said that Cynthia Nixon was originally cast because of her physical resemblance to the pale, red-haired poet, though her amazing subtlety as an actress and her sharp intelligence can't have done any harm. To the evident dismay of her fans (see earlier reviews, passim), instead of the sharp-eyed nature poet or the gentle, self-mocking social satirist, Davies gives us Emily the existentialist---uncompromising, irreverent, no fan of Longfellow ("gruel!"), suspicious of the clergy (or even of the Deity Himself), preoccupied with death, bereavement and "eternity." Dickinson mavens will no doubt object to the additions and subtractions in Davies's script. There's lots of Vryling Buffham---except for the foofy name, an invented character who helps young Emily and her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle) fill their days with brittle, "superficial" chatter--not so much of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and other significant figures in her life. A more serious problem, IMHO, is that Davies's dialogue sounds pretty stagy in these early scenes, like a mashup of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde, and even old pros like Nixon and Ehle can seem uncomfortable with their lines. As Emily's adult personality becomes more sharply defined, though, and her craving for solitude and certainty more intense, Davies is entirely in his element, and the second half of the film is totally involving.Keith Carradine is a good left-field casting choice for the whiskery paterfamilias, Edward Dickinson, and radiant Jennifer Ehle is always welcome. Belgian singer/actress Noémie Schellens makes Mabel Loomis Todd, Emily's brother Austin's scandalous love interest, seem suitably irresistible. (Fact check: though the lovers were carrying on in a room adjoining Emily's, she and Mabel never actually set eyes on each other, or so we're told.) A bracketing scene, in which Austin's wife Susan confesses to Emily that she finds "that particular part of marriage" distasteful, is quite affecting (though also presumably invented). The most powerful shot in the film is a poetic, purely visual expression of Dickinson's complex attitude toward love and solitude: after she rebuffs a series of visitors (including a newspaper editor who's in the doghouse for adjusting her eccentric punctuation), we watch as she's visited by a phantom lover, a time-lapse blurry apparition that mounts the staircase to seek her out in her bedroom.
Andres-Camara It is a movie that has all the points to be a good movie, however, does not become a good movie, because none of those points gets to be well finished. It is also a film, too arrogant, that uses too many fancy phrases which makes me leave the film. I do not think that to look like an intellectual, you have to use that language.The tempo of the movie is too slow. It was not necessary and causes the viewer to be bored. He tries to make a poetic and adult film and abuses that time too many times.There is a moment when he takes the pictures, which is very good. It is a way to raise the aging of the family, but equally, to have made a photo would have been enough, it is not necessary to take photos of all, since you have already told and you are sleeping to the viewer.Cynthia Nixon, plays a formidable role, gets you to believe everything that happens to her, even illness and that is very difficult. The bad thing and I imagine that it will be, because its real personage was like this, is that being a woman so feminist that it looked for the freedom in his life and the equality with the men, thing of admiring, I do not understand why it was constantly like the others lived their life. As the movie progresses, I get worse and worse and that at first, I was completely in agreement with her. The other actors are formidable too, is the strength of this film. Even Keith Carradine and that's hard to believe in the wig they have put.The make-up and the costumes are very good except the father, who gets me much of the film.The constant voice-over of the poems is something else that I do not like at all. They make the movie slower and I do not think they are necessary.The photograph, which is almost always impressive, I think is very confused, I explain, I think this film is extremely sad, other than the director can make it cold for the viewer or at least distant and deserved a sad and cold picture and however do not marvel with a warm and friendly photograph.The manager, I think he is wrong in everything. The planes are ugly, they are all badly composed, the camera movements are empty. It seems that the actors went to shoot alone because it is a succession of close-ups, as if they were alone and that gets me a lot of the film. In addition he is wrong in the tempo and the length of the film that is too long.Of course the final sequence, I think is left, we have already learned what has happened. And above it has a whitish and warm photograph, at that moment.