Wild Nights With Emily (2018) may not be the formal tour de force of Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion (2016), but it is equally essential to our cinematic culture. Where Davies sought to imbue his film with the spirit of Emily Dickinson’s poetry with a formal construction that was as plastic as it was emotional volatile, Wild Nights With Emily takes Dickinson’s own poetry and correspondence as the basis for its form. Director Madeleine Olnek does a masterful job distilling Dickinson’s works into a series of theatrical tableaus that move hither and fro between all out dream scapes and a subtle externalization of a character’s interiority.
One reason why I suggest Olnek’s stylistic biography is essential is that it is one of those few films that adapts a queer woman’s work for film where the source material pre-dates the twentieth century. It is in this adaptation that Olnek seeks to re-write the popular idea of Emily Dickinson, dispelling notions that she was an eccentric recluse who feared her work being published. By remaining very faithful to her source material Olnek reveals that Dickinson was a queer woman who was purposefully shut out from the American literary world.
Molly Shannon’s Emily Dickinson is a campy firebrand whose intellect stifles almost everyone around her. Olnek has clearly set out to get performances from her players that align with the traditions of queer expression one sees in the films of queer filmmaking giants Ulrike Ottinger and the early works of Werner Schroeter. This quasi-Brechtian style foregrounds the text and not the emotional content of the actors’ performances, making Dickinson’s own voice the dominant expression of the film. It’s essentially a process akin to making a music video.
I have no doubts that Olnek’s brazen style will be off putting at first but it doesn’t take long to adapt to and the rewards are enormous. Wild Nights With Emily is a great work of queer advocacy that deserves wider recognition. It also happens to be pretty hysterical when it wants to be.
