Wild Nights with Emily

— I remember when Julie Harris was celebrated for her Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst” and later, when Cynthia Nixon garnered acclaim as Emily Dickinson in “A Quiet Passion.” I thought I’d had my fill of Emily biopics until “Wild Nights with Emily” changed the narrative entirely. Instead of a shy, solitary, spinster, scribbling poems on scraps of paper and stashing them in the attic for a lifetime, this film uses a raft of letters Emily wrote to her sister-in-law Susan, to depict a livelong lesbian relationship with Susan, living side by side with both women moving freely from one house to the next. Emily writes furiously but isn’t published, not because she didn’t want the world to read her poetry, but because she’s a woman in a world of male editors and her unusual, non-rhyming style just isn’t well received. Instead of a biopic, this is more a comedy-bio-drama. It’s hard not to be impressed by how clever parts of the film are. It comes at you from several perspectives, and some scenes look more like a community theater melodrama while others are quirky, Hollywood film. Sometimes a scene is played mostly for laughs while the next scene seems completely serious. Camera angles are often a little off kilter, head shots may be a little too tight, and lighting can be unusually harsh. The unevenness seems like a weakness but, in the end, it may make sense since the film’s dealing with something of an academic or scholarly issue, questioning if the mysterious and reclusive picture we’ve all heard was fabricated or not. It’s not a great film but it is an interesting one, particularly if you took more than a few literature courses in college.

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[2018. 84 min. Directed by Madeleine Olnek. Starring Molly Shannon, Susan Ziegler, and Amy Seimetz.]
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wild-nights-with-emily-2019