A Quiet Passion

It's a film made in the image of Dickinson and her poetry, in other words: starkly original, but without much show of fuss.

Davies doesn't shrink from the challenges this darkened mood poses for his audience.

It's a singular life, marred by the fact that Dickinson didn't live to enjoy the admiration her poems now attract. And I can't think of another director with the sensibility to put it on screen.

By making Dickinson an iconoclast acceptable to a 21st-century audience, and by not offering a perspective on her relationship to this seismic moment in American letters, the film undermines her as a writer and intellectual.