Search - A Quiet Passion on DVD

Lenka S. from DANVILLE, PA
Reviewed on 3/6/2020...

There is a scene in A Quiet Passion which encapsulates all of what is horrible, dishonest and blinkered about this irritating movie. Emily Dickinson asks someone to remove a single, perfectly browned loaf of bread from a clean, tidy oven.

But we never see Dickinson baking the bread, getting her hands dirty, being sweaty, tending the finicky and devilishly hot, wood burning stove. In fact, we never see her getting dressed, doing chores, tending to the daily drudgery, which she in fact did - she baked for the entire family, and she cared for her ailing mother much sooner than the film suggests. This is important, because to understand Dickinson you have to get this fact - She. Worked. Hard. She labored. Later in life, Dickinson would have probably been more handy around the house than most adult men today. Instead, we see a disembodied Emily, all bon mots, quips and, most horrible of all - a contrarian, an intellectual gainsayer who seems to take nasty pleasure in verbally wounding others. This is 21st Century narcissistic swill - where we remake our heroines in our own image: as “poetic souls”, tortured, victimized by the Patriarchy and embittered by frustrated genius. This misses the brilliance of who she was and what she actually did. To appreciate the lightness of her poetry you need to understand the sheer physical weight of her world, a world she somehow transcended - not out of noble bitterness or through some proto-feminist defiance, as the movie suggests, but through her own grace, and what was undoubtedly acceptance of her role. She was naturally introverted and her focus was quite comfortably on the domestic. Her poetry fed her and buoyed her and grew out of a love for and comfort with herself.

To cut her off at the neck and to make her a disagreeable intellectual, marginalizes not only her poetry but her inherent lightness of being.