Wild Nights with Emily, streaming now on Amazon Prime, directed by Madeline Olnek, starring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson, was exceptionally silly. That is not a criticism.
Most of us encounter Emily Dickinson in High School, where we are taught her poetry in the way least likely to allow us to actually enjoy any of it. Using it as an example of meter and rhyme, we all end up singing “Because I could Not Stop For Death He Kindly Stopped For Me,” to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas, without really touching upon the commonalities of 19th century hymnal music that would give context to that fact. I had an exceptionally terrible 10th grade American lit teacher, who we called Fifi, who managed to parrot the party line about Dickinson being a “recluse” and I was still able to guess that she was actually a dedicated writer who had no interest in taking care of someone’s household. What I did not know at the time was that she was gay af.
In 1998, it was discovered that mentions of Emily’s sister-in-law, Susan, had been physically erased from many of her letters and poems. The collection of her letters at Amherst have managed to put together some of their story, which you can find online at the Dickinson Electronic Archives.
Wild Nights With Emily begins from the perspective that given how passionate Emily and Susan’s relationship was…how did we get from there to the “aloof recluse” we were taught about in school? The agent of that new, less passionate, Emily is one Mabel Todd, the woman who published Dickinson’s poetry posthumously. The movie follows the life and loves of the Dickinsons, Emily and her brother Austin, sister Lavinia and their various entwinements with Mabel Todd. Emily is portrayed as an amusingly snarky and intense person, Susan as the voice of reason who is wholly supportive of Emily. Pretty much everyone else comes across as ridiculous. Austin’s affair with Mabel Todd is tawdry, the men who nitpick Emily’s work are self-involved and mendacious. Todd herself take the brunt of seeming ridiculous, and the sound of her erasing Susan from Emily’s letters accompanies the final credits. We found ourselves barking with laughter, rather more often than we imagined we might.
The one genuine weak point was the acting. The first half of the movie felt like everyone was reading their lines, rather than performing them. It did settle down a little by the end, although Todd’s lines are excruciating throughout…on purpose, I presume, to make her look more foolish. The pace of the movie is frantic and non-linear, which worked fine to keep the story on point.
In the end, we found the movie to be a goofy, yet, effective way to address the enormity of the erasure of Emily’s passionate nature, and the devolution of a brilliant woman into a distant recluse whose poetry had to be shoehorned into more “acceptable” form to be received with any critical acclaim.
Ratings:
Cinematography – 6
Acting – 4
Story – 8
Characters – 8
LGBTQ – 10
Overall – 7
This is not a masterpiece of movie-making. But it is a sharp-tongued commentary on Dickinson’s passionate love for her sister-in-law having been largely bowdlerized from her writings and biography.
