Director: Terence Davies
Year:  2016
Rating: 7.5

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This bio-pic of the life of Emily Dickinson has layers of melancholy that feel unstintingly honest and profound and certainly not easy to witness or digest. Not that I am a fan of Dickinson or poetry in general for that matter and I last read her poems in college I expect – but the few people I know who are absorbed by poetry and the one friend who is a published poet admire and love Dickinson like few others. In her lifetime (1830-1886) Dickinson was able to publish only 11 poems of the approximately 1,800 that she wrote. She was completely unknown outside of her inner circle of family and friends and few of them had much to say about her quaint hobby. After her death, her younger sister took all her poems and tried to get them published. Many were but often with editing by the publishers and it wasn’t until 1955 that her poems were published just as she wanted them.




So, Dickinson wrote basically for herself; to express her view of the world, of religion, of mortality, death and the afterlife if there was one, of her position in a male dominated society and of nature and beauty. From the outside Dickinson had a remarkably ordinary and plain life – devoted to her family, never getting married or likely ever being loved romantically, a baker of bread, a letter writer, a church goer – but inside she seethed and raged against the world. In her poetry.


The film begins as a flower in bloom; a young radiant Emily rebellious in spirit and at odds with convention and the strictures that society put around her. But time took care of that and Emily withers before our eyes, slowly and painfully. In one scene that affected me, her family each individually get their photograph taken and while sitting the film transitions them all from young to much aged as if life has flashed by in a solitary moment and as one who is approaching elder status with regret I think about this at times – how does life go by so quickly – where did it go - how did I get here – why does that person from 30 years ago not even feel real to me anymore – why does what I feel now feel so unconnected to what came before. Of course that is not true, but it seems that way because I cannot grasp memory, I cannot feel it in my hand, it is ephemeral, slippery and elusive.



As the years pass Emily becomes embittered and her words to others are like barbed arrows meant to hurt and humiliate. She cloisters herself in her home and then her room, speaking to visitors only through the door. Her friends and family leave her either through death or marriage or circumstance and they all create holes in her life as if they are intended betrayals. She mourns for her life. And finally, she dies. That is not a spoiler I hope for the fact that this took place well over 100 years ago. A life that for Emily felt pointless and useless and with no idea how her poetry would affect so many people later.


Director Terence Davies unfolds the life of Dickinson at a glacial pace cocooned in a beautiful painterly gaze with low lighting and claustrophobic surroundings. The dialogue feels like we are in a Jane Austen book; pointed, witty and at times acerbic. Was conversation back then an art form I wonder – a contest of sorts? The film takes patience but in the end well worth the effort.


This is from the poem that ends the film.

Tie the strings to my life, my Lord,

Then I am ready to go!

Just a look at the horses—

Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest side,

So I shall never fall;

For we must ride to the Judgment,

And it’s partly down hill.

But never I mind the bridges,

And never I mind the sea;

Held fast in everlasting race

By my own choice and thee.

Good-by to the life I used to live,

And the world I used to know;

And kiss the hills for me, just once;

Now I am ready to go!