A Quiet Passion

Writer/director Terence Davies has the intellectual courtesy and artistic integrity not to pretend to have fathomed his subject's psyche in this respectful, if sometimes inert portrait of Emily Dickinson. Yet he affords Cynthia Nixon the freedom to explore beyond the poet's prim image and present a witty, emotional and independent woman who was never afraid to express her opinions, whether dealing with an interfering editor or an adulterous brother. Notwithstanding a platonic attachment to a married clergyman (Eric Loren), however, Dickinson's closest relationships were with her sister Lavinia, sister-in-law Susan and best friend Vryling Buffum. Jennifer Ehle, Jodhi May and Catherine Bailey provide deft support in those respective roles, even though Davies's script proves no match for Dickinson's poetry. But, shooting on meticulously crafted sets to ensure exacting control over the look and feel of the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Davies achieves a tableau realism that enables him to dissect the manners and mores of 19th-century America with elegance and sincerity.