I know next to nothing about poetess Emily Dickinson; truth be told, I don’t care for poetry (my own very modest efforts aside). This offbeat biography notes that Dickinson has always been considered a recluse who never meant to publish her work, which is pretty much what I have believed (when I considered the matter at all) — yet determines to set the record straight, and does so with believable arguments. Instead of the recluse we imagined, Emily was actually a strange, passionate lesbian who wouldn’t have minded fame as a writer but feared the public spotlight — I think. The movie is just weird enough to make me wonder if I understood it correctly.

Madeleine Olnek’s film, which she also wrote, destroys many common misconceptions about the poetess, but does so in bizarre fashion. Instead of a standard biopic format wherein a competent actress (in this case, Molly Shannon) could create a character of note and persuade us who interesting she really was, Olnek adopts an outsider’s perspective regarding the writer, forcing Emily to be a spectator to her own tale. There are aspects of this story that seem too incredible to believe, even if they are true, most involving the woman, Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), having an affair with Emily’s married brother. Mabel lives next door and eventually edits Emily’s poetry, despite never having actually met her!

The facts are strange enough to make a fascinating tale, but Olnek tries to satirize the situation in the manner of a Saturday Night Live sketch or an episode of Drunk History, broadly skewering the romantic situations as Emily loves her cousin Susan (Susan Ziegler) while Mabel sleeps with whoever catches her fancy. The approach doesn’t work for me; what is meant to be sly is insipid, what is meant to be cute is irritating. The PG-13 rating doesn’t help matters; no wild nights ensue, while the potentially provocative lesbianism is reduced to a series of secretive kisses.

What stays with me from this film, for better or worse, is the concluding sequence, in which Mabel and Emily’s doltish brother erase Susan’s name from Emily’s poetry to replace it with male names, for the sake of posterity. This, at least, is presented without farce, and is far and away the most jaw-dropping, effective moment of the proceedings, showing without irony the casual disregard for honesty that some people so ignorantly display. This sequence raises my rating all by itself. ☆ ☆. 17 July 2019.