Poetry and pain in a New England life

Cynthia Nixon joins director Terence Davies for A Quiet Passion, a movie about Emily Dickinson.

During her lifetime, only a few of Emily Dickinson's poems were published. Most of Dickinson's work received attention after her death in 1886. For most of her 55 years, Dickinson led what most would regard as an isolated life, which makes her a fine subject for director Terence Davies, a filmmaker who understands the mournful qualities of lives tormented by big questions.

The best of Davies' work (Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes) survive as personal masterpieces, cinematic constructions haunted by the sadness of once-vibrant lives lost to the obliterating mists of history. In A Quiet Passion, Davies brings a meticulous awareness to the story of a poet who spent her final years living in isolation in her native Massachusetts.

No one who's familiar with Davies' work will be surprised that there's an alarming quiet in Davies' new film, a sense of how life was lived before the intrusion of the contemporary noise which inundates and distracts us. That silence can be taken as a ferociously empty backdrop against which lives rattle on, some -- like Dickinson's -- with an acute awareness of their finite nature.

Early on, we meet Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) as a student at Mount Holyoke College, where she's immersed in a severe religious environment that ill-suited her exploratory mind. When her father (Keith Carradine) comes to retrieve her with her brother (Duncan Duff) and sister (Jennifer Ehle), Dickinson couldn't be happier. She wryly confesses that such a severe dose of evangelism has made her ill.

Upon returning home, Dickinson asks her father if he would object if she wrote during the quiet of night. He agrees. She begins her engagement with her life's work.

Dickinson charted a deep course, indulging her preoccupation with the frailties of the body and with life's ultimate destination, the grave. "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,'' is one of the Dickinson poems you might want to read as an accompaniment to Davies' movie, which -- of course -- offers bits and pieces of other Dickinson poems.

Much of the movie involves domestic scenes in Dickinson's home: arguments with her father when she refuses to attend church, entreaties by her sister Lavinia to open her heart to living, disapproval of her brother Austin's affair, and her relationship with Austin's wife (Jodhi May). Dickinson also becomes infatuated with a married pastor (Eric Loren) whose wife (Simone Milsdochter) seems to have one quality: reproach.

Early scenes receive a comic lift from the bumptious hypocrisy of Dickinson's aunt (Annette Badland), who writes bad poetry. Dickinson's mother (Joanna Bacon) remains emotionally distant from the affairs of the household.

We also meet Emily's demonstrative friend Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey), a woman who has little use for the rules of society but who ultimately submits to social pressures that require her to marry.

At one point, Davies creates an interlude about the Civil War, the violent tragedy that raged during Dickinson's time. He does this by showing photos from Gettysburg and Antietam.

As much as anything, A Quiet Passion makes us feel the aching emptiness of the present, and the movie unfolds with the resonance of a deliberate footfall on a hardwood floor.

Nixon creates a Dickinson who's fiercely independent and yet enmeshed in the life of her family. Eventually, she retreats to her room and, for the most part, remains there.

I can't say that I wasn't a trifle bored at times, but Davies seeks to enlighten us about the incongruities of the period: The quest for transcendence set against the starched rigors of parlor life, for example. A Quiet Passion isn't for every taste, but like Dickinson, Davies always goes his own way, an increasingly estimable quality in today's cinema of formula and cant.

Another bad cop on the road to ruin

I don’t know if it's possible for an actor to give more to a role than Woody Harrelson gives in Rampart, another story about a massively corrupt cop whose life is mired in a multiplicity of betrayals -- not the least of which is the betrayal of responsibility as an officer of the law. It may help to think of Rampart as The Bad Lieutenant west, a movie that recalls director Abel Ferrara's sensational (as in tabloid “sensational”) 1992 look at a corrupt New York City detective played by Harvey Keitel

Rampart takes place in 1999, and is named for a real-life LAPD scandal involving police ties to gangs. But Rampart, which was directed by the gifted Owen Moverman (The Messenger), takes place after that scandal and presumably acquires its name because of the poisonous atmosphere of mistrust it generated around the already tarnished LAPD. Rampart is less an indictment of the LAPD than a roiling, agitated look at a uniformed cop who has been bad so long, he doesn’t even remember what good looks like.

Harrelson plays David Douglas Brown, a cop who has been given the nickname of “Date Rape” by his fellow officers: He's suspected of having killed a serial rapist, doling out his own brand of justice without the encumbrance of a trial. He’s a swaggering, cocky member of the LAPD who may actually think of himself as a good cop; i.e., one who prizes results over procedural niceties.

It's easy to see how a cop might fall into this trap: If you cross the line to achieve what you regard as a good end, how long before you cross it just because you can?

As this edgy -- even jagged -- movie progresses, Brown reveals himself as a lost soul who’s estranged from his current wife (Anne Heche), and who happens to be the sister of his former wife (Cynthia Nixon), a needless domestic complication in a script credited to James Ellroy and Moverman.

Brown’s also a father; he shares tender moments with his youngest daughter (Stella Schnabel), but his teen-age daughter (Brie Larson) treats him with rueful disregard. Because Brown's such a well-known louse, Larson's Helen evidently views her sullenness as a kind of entitlement.

After Messenger, a terrific little movie about two Army officers (Harrelson and Ben Foster) assigned to informing next of kins about loved ones who have been killed in battle, a lot of actors probably wanted to work with Moverman. His strong supporting cast includes Messenger vet Foster, as a wheelchair bound bum; Ice Cube, as an internal affairs investigator; Ned Beatty, as a retried cop who seems to have schooled Brown in corruption; and Robin Wright, as a lawyer and extracurricular love interest for Brown.

They’re all good, but the movie is caught in Brown’s corrupt swirl. Somewhere near the mid-picture mark, he's caught on camera beating a fleeing suspect, an incident that creates a Rodney King-style furor. He tries to rob a poker game to generate cash for himself, and winds up being investigated for an unlawful shooting. He smokes too much and drinks excessively. He's a dangerous wreck of a man, who offers arrogant rationalizations to the police psychologist (Sigourney Weaver) who questions him. He did time in Vietnam and has been on the crime front lines for decades. That's his rap.

Rampart aims for gritty truth, but may be too caught up in Brown's delirium to find any. You’ll find some overwrought scenes and lots of pulp-flavored cinematography as Rampart follows Brown’s descent into a private hell that, in the end, seems all too familiar -- not necessarily from reality, but from other movies that have tried to plumb the souls of other cops gone bad.

Harrelson deserves credit for pulling out all the stops, but Rampart is so hell bent on pushing his character beyond the moral pale, that it ultimately lets him down. Rampart is well-performed, but it often feels as tarnished as its main character.


Footnotes: I don't know what it means (probably nothing) but for those who collect coincidences: Brei Larson, who out-sullens just about every known teen-ager in Rampart, has a much lighter turn in 21 Jump Street, which also opens this week. Ice Cube, who plays an internal investigator for the LAPD in Rampart, portrays another cop in 21 Jump Street. Of Ice Cube's two performances, I prefer his work in Rampart, which allows him to break out of his one-note, scowling mode.