Mark Reviews Movies: WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 18, 2019

The myth of Emily Dickinson is that the poet, unrecognized during her lifetime, was an anti-social and solitary person, who wasn't published to any significant degree until after her death because that was her decision. She lived a lonely life, without any fame or joy or romantic love, described with terms such as "spinster" and "recluse."

Such contemporary notions about Dickinson, which persisted for decades after her death, have been challenged by scholars, historians, and at least one family member, who studied and wrote about her relation's life and how the writer's work, both her poetry and personal correspondences, reflected a much deeper passion. Wild Nights with Emily posits an intimate passion with a specific person—a woman with whom the poet had been friends since childhood and who would go on to become Dickinson's sister-in-law.

Writer/director Madeleine Olnek goes further than most biographies about a subject as elusive as Dickinson might. Some might suggest, either through innuendo or conjecture, that the poet had a romantic relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, who married the writer's older brother William, known mostly by his middle name Austin.

Olnek, though, throws suggestion, innuendo, and conjecture out the window. This film treats a romance between Emily (Molly Shannon) and Susan (Susan Ziegler) as fact. Whether or not that assertion is completely true (At this point, there's probably no way to tell for certain, although there is evidence that it could be accurate), the film's depiction of that possible relationship does help to explain Dickinson as a person, as a writer, and as the long-debated and much-mythologized subject of what amounts to historical gossip.

That concept of gossip is actually a through line of Olnek's screenplay, which plays Dickson's life and the interpretation of the writers' life after her death as a low-key comedy. It's clearly a thoroughly researched one, though, which deconstructs the myths, as well as the origin of those myths, of Dickinson's life. Olnek even embeds Dickinson's poetry into the film's story and visuals (It opens and closes with thanks to an academic library for providing access to the original texts, meaning all of the punctuation—dashes and all—is presented as the writer intended).

The gossip likely existed while Dickinson was alive, although this version of Emily has too many other concerns to concern herself with such nonsense, but it's Mabel Loomis Todd (Amy Seimetz) who gives those rumors an air of literary and biographical authority. Olnek's story switches between the screenwriter's version of Emily's life and Mabel, offering a lecture to a group of eager listeners on the subject of her now-deceased "friend"—whom the biographer and editor of Emily's poetry never met until the writer was in her casket. She proudly announces this fact to her audience, as if it makes her an unquestionable expert on the poet.

In Mabel's mind, that lack of a meeting—even though she spent days upon days playing piano in Emily's house and being in close company with Emily's brother Austin (Kevin Seal)—is enough to confirm the poet as a recluse. After all, who wouldn't want to meet Mabel? Never anyone mind that she was having a not-so-secret affair with Austin, putting Susan, the woman that Emily has loved for as long as she understood the concept of love, in an uncomfortable situation.

A good amount of the comedy here is based on such ignorance. Nobody suspects the romance between Emily and Susan, because nobody even considers it a possibility. The two become close as teenagers, spending a month together in Emily's home while her family is away on business, and when Susan leaves the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where Emily lived her entire life, in order to teach, she returns to marry Austin, who has decided to build a house right next door to his childhood home—where Emily still lives. It is, after all, perfectly normal for friends/sisters-in-law to spend hours together.

Other ignorant people include Austin, who eventually goes about his affair with Mabel as if no one will notice, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman), a former soldier (who can't recall his military experience) and publisher and so-called feminist (who encourages women to write but rarely publishes their work and who believes women should have the right to vote—eventually, in the future, when politics aren't so complex). Besides Emily and Susan, the most intelligent character may be Susan's daughter, who intrinsically knows the truth about her mother and her aunt. Later, she announces it to the world—or the three people who will listen in a lecture hall.

Despite the film's eclectic side players and subdued comedic tone, which deals in social mores and the juxtaposition of truth and rumor, Olnek still has made a fairly reliable biography of Dickinson, which shows her struggle to be published when few want to take risks with her writing style and presents her as a woman who only seems reclusive because she grows tired of suffering fools. There are many fools in and near Amherst. The film also treats Dickinson's poetry with genuine respect, putting the text on screen and, on two occasions, translating the poet's metaphors into visuals (The more haunting one has Emily and a fallen soldier, speaking in their graves while on-screen text fills the silence).

Above all else, though, it's an affecting romance between two people who understand each other better than anyone else can or is willing to. Wild Nights with Emily may be partially truth and partially fiction (We may never know for certain), but in its deconstruction of truth and fiction, the film feels honest—and then some.

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