Wild Nights With Emily
(USA, 85 min.)
Written and directed by Madeleine Olnek
Starring: Molly Shannon, Amy Seimetz, Susan Ziegler, Brett
Gelman
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| Molly Shannon stars as Emily Dickinson in Wild Nights With Emily Greenwich Entertainment |
All these years we’ve been idolizing Emily Dickinson as a
woman of quiet passion. English classes peruse her poems through the lens of
loneliness and the melancholy tone of unrequited love. Emily, it turns out, was
a demon in the sack with her sister in law.
Olnek dives into recent critical appraisals of Dickinson’s work
that view her life and poetry through her allegedly intimate relationship with
her best friend and sister-in-law, Susan. Dickinson comes alive through a
delightfully spirited performance by Molly Shannon, while Susan Ziegler is
giddy fun as Susan. The film finds a droll point to complete its triangle with
Amy Seimetz as Mabel Todd, the editor who posthumously packaged Dickinson’s
poetry for publication and purportedly reframed much of the poet’s work to straighten
out its romantic passion. Olnek plays with the miscalculations of history with
tongue-in-cheek humour as she frames Emily and Susan’s relationship in two
threads with one depicting history as it was experienced and the other offering
history as it was told.
The latter thread sees Mabel telling the “story” to a gaggle
of women’s society types who smile and nod while hearing of Emily’s struggle to
publish. Seimetz is a hoot sending up everyone who was complicit in either
undervaluing Dickinson’s work or denying her voice. She offers the film’s
biggest performance as Mabel shamelessly takes credit for Dickinson’s success,
in turn giving the film a well-earned sense of significance in its rewrite of
history.
The former thread goes inside Emily’s home to challenge the
characterization of the poet as a skittish and reclusive writer plagued by
unrequited love. Emily and Susan, next-door neighbours, send one another love
letters several times per day and often get it on while the latter’s kids are
at school. There are great details of domestic life that observe the nuances of
Dickinson’s inspiration, like dashing off poems on the backside of recipe
cards, that were foreign to the male editors and publishers who dismissed her
work.
The romance between the two women, however, is a playful
spark. Susan is decidedly Emily’s muse, and one can appreciate this fact
regardless of whether one agrees with the angle that suggests the two were
intimate, but the film sees Susan inspiring Emily by her presence, whereas the
essays of English classes gone by have often interpreted Emily’s poems through
a sense of absence. The tone of the poems changes somewhat in Wild Nights With Emily. The sad cat lady
becomes deeply romantic. Her signature dashes become secret, conspiratorial
pauses, rather than show-offy breaths of punctuation. (It’s also very, very
funny to see how the film plays with the men’s rigid definition of poetry in
which all good things rhyme in broke-ass couplets.)
Olnek frequently places Dickinson’s poems as onscreen text
while Shannon addresses the camera directly and softly gives life to their
words. Shannon has the perfect look for the part—slightly weathered and stern,
but with an ever-present laugh contained beneath the surface—and an even better
sense of humor as Emily’s aged wisdom and fatigue with the publishing patriarchy
offer droll satire and biting truth in her wrinkles and dry wit. She’s never
been better, nor shown just how funny she can be while muting herself so
carefully. Her sense of comedic timing is especially sharp and at its best when
she outplays her males counterparts, as in a scene with Emily’s prospective
editor Higginson (Brett Gelman), who mansplains her on the art of a good poem.
Played with nods and winks to the old-fashioned prudishness
and sexism of Dickinson’s day, Wild
Nights with Emily is a thoroughly contemporary take on literary history.
The film is a master class in tone and comedic restraint as Olnek uses the
cadence, language, and comportment of mid-19th century America to
honour two women whose plight and whose love echoes throughout the experiences
of women today. “Tell the truth, but tell it slant,” eh, Em?
Wild Nights with
Emily opens in Toronto on June 7.
