Butler's Cinema Scene

Molly Shannon, Susan Ziegler

“WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY” My rating: B-

84 minutes | MPAA rating

“Wild Nights with Emily” is such an awesome idea that I wish I liked the film more than I do.

When Emily Dickinson died in 1886 in Amherst, Mass., she left behind nearly 2,000 unpublished poems which would lead future generations to regard her as America’s greatest poet.

For most of the ensuing 130 odd years Dickinson has had the reputation of a recluse, a woman incapable of interacting with others. But if that’s the case, if her personal life were so limited, if she never enjoyed human intimacy, how did she come by the ideas and emotions so brilliantly expressed in her writing?

Seizing on recent research into and discoveries about Dickinson, writer/director Madeleine Olnek has given us a film that presents Emily Dickinson not so much as a recluse as a dedicated artist who, by the by, had a lifelong sexual relationship with the woman who would become her sister-in-law. We’re talking some good old-fashioned lust.

Moreover, Olnek presents her yarn as a comedy in which Dickinson’s vastly superior intellect and talents go head-to-head with the doofuses who run the male-dominated literary world of the 1800s. These bozos are so gobsmacked by her poetry that  all they can do is complain that it doesn’t rhyme.

Olnek’s screenplay time jumps from Dickinson’s mature years and her affair with her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler) back to her adolescence when the two first fell in love (the girls are played as teens by Dana Melanie and Sasha Frolova).

Molly Shannon, Susan Ziegler

Periodically we’re jettisoned into the post-Emily future where Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), the executor of Dickinson’s literary estate, goes on the lecture circuit to exploit her “relationship” with the poet (she was the mistress of Emily’s brother Ambrose) for paying audiences of bonnetted biddies.

In theory this is all terrific, a disarmingly different way of looking at the life of a literary great (it’s about 180-degrees different than 2016’s reverential “A Quiet Passion” in which Cynthia Nixon portrayed a brilliant but broken Emily).

In practice it’s a very mixed bag.  The ultra-low-budget production values and iffy acting in many of the supporting roles (we’re talking  high school level) remind of an episode of Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” The difference is that “Drunk History” tells each of its stories in 15 minutes; “Wild Nights with Emily” is a feature, and its minimalist charms quickly wear off.

Moreover, “Wild Nights…” isn’t so much funny ha-ha as funny strange.

And yet, in its final moments — when Olnek deftly contrasts Susan’s preparation of Emily’s body for burial with the ham-fisted editing of the poems by Mabel Todd (she literally erased hundreds of references to Susan and their sapphic relationship) — the film achieves a sort of tragic grace.

| Robert W. Butler