A Quiet Passion

Despite the remarkable consistency in Davies’ filmography, he has actually assayed a number of genres, from personal essay and experimental cinema to meticulously appointed chamber dramas. With A QUIET PASSION, Davies delivered his first biopic, and as one might expect, he upends the expectations that accompany the historical biography. A portrait of Emily Dickinson, the film toes the line between fact and speculation, using the poet’s words to envision the literary radical who would have composed them. Davies’ Dickinson is a woman of fitful contradiction: devout but skeptical of official dogma, demure but self-possessed, wry and sharp-witted even as she contemplates mortality’s inexorable pull. Anchored by Nixon’s subtle yet commanding central performance, it is in many respects a film only Davies could have made. Drawing from the solemn yet transportive mode of his earliest works, Davies exacts a formal reversal of sorts. Instead of generating narrative meaning through associative reverie, here the filmmaker builds out from Dickinson’s work, producing a biography through poetic inference. A QUIET PASSION allows its central relationships – particularly Emily’s friendships with sister Livinia and Vryling Buffum – to emerge from otherwise isolated moments of camaraderie and joy. (Michael Sicinski)