★★★★
PG, 125 minutes
Nobody goes to a Terence Davies film to be cheered up. His work occupies a narrow band between the mournful and the tragic and if you're really lucky, you'll be treated to a brief but potent flash of mordant humour.
But his style is poetic and the results are intensely beautiful. In other words, he and the reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson are a perfect match.
When Dickinson died in 1886 aged 56, only a few of her 1800 poems had been published. For the last decades of her life, she kept to her room in the Homestead, the house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she had been born. Writing was her solace and her obsession. She wrote a stream of letters to the friends she had made in her youth at school and college and during her early forays into the wider world. And the poems were read by her family – her sister, Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle), her brother, Austin (Duncan Duff), and his wife, Susan (Jodhi May).
Davies charts her gradual withdrawal to the room upstairs with an impeccable evocation of the Dickinsons' stitched-up milieu at the centre of New England's Puritan society. With her oval, full-lipped face and slightly startled gaze, Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon bears a strong resemblance to the Dickinson we know from the only authenticated image of her. She also catches the nervy intelligence that enlivens the poems. She has wit and she's hungry for friends who can help her exercise it.
In real life, Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey) was closer to Vinnie than Emily, but Davies has polished and sharpened, turning her into a composite of Dickinson's closest friends, and the two women's exchanges on men, family and the disadvantages of marriage are a lot of fun, a word I never thought I'd use about a Davies film.
The poems are another attraction. Incorporated into the voiceover narration as an internal monologue, they're a link to the scene outside Dickinson's window, reflecting time's passing in the changing of the seasons.
Her disappointments flow from her stubborn insistence on staying put while those whom she loves inevitably move out of her life. Vryling marries, despite her earlier protestations. And Charles Wadsworth (Eric Loren), the local pastor, who gives the poems the praise Dickinson craves, eventually leaves for another parish.
And in the household itself, things change. Austin, who lives next door with Susan and their children, begins what will become a long affair with a flamboyant neighbour, Mabel Loomis Todd (Noemie Schellens), and there are significant consequences for them all. Davies doesn't attempt to go into the whole story yet you're told enough to want more and the film threatens to derail because of it.
But Nixon's performance – and Dickinson's poetry – hold it together. 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.