Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 24 minutes
Director: Madeleine Olnek
Quick Impressions:
This weekend, we’re seeing Avengers with our kids, but I already had a movie in mind to watch while the rest of the world was at End Game. A few weeks ago at the movie theater, as I walked to the ladies’ room during the pre-show, I happened to notice an enormous Coming Soon poster for a film starring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson! Molly Shannon! As Emily Dickinson!
That kind of thing makes an impression. I resisted the urge to turn back immediately, so I could share this shocking news with my husband as quickly as possible. When I did get back to my seat, I was dismayed to discover that the trailer for Wild Nights with Emily was already in progress. (I was glad to get a look at the film, but bitterly disappointed that I didn’t get to shock my husband by breaking the news.)
During Molly Shannon’s six-year stint on Saturday Night Live, I watched the show every week. Often, my younger sister and I would bond by watching together, taping the show, then trying to convince our parents they found it funny the next afternoon. (This rarely worked.) Of course, when I was first away at college, I didn’t have a TV, so my sister would tape SNL for me, and then she’d catch me up when I came home on breaks or for a visit.
For me, Molly Shannon is one of those people whose material mysteriously gets funnier the longer it kicks around in my head. I’d watch on TV and be mildly amused, but now at some random moment, I’ll be driving down the street and suddenly start laughing because I hear her voice in my head. (This often happens when the speed limit changes to 50 as it does every time I drive on the only road that leads out of my neighborhood.)
Also, every time I think of Molly Shannon, I remember how much one of my college roommates loved Dog Show. She found that sketch so hilarious–every time!–that she would collapse on the floor unable to breathe. For the rest of us, her reaction was part of the entertainment.
Before this movie, I think I most recently saw Shannon making a guest appearance on the Disney Channel hit Jessie (which my daughter binge-watched obsessively multiple times. For a while there, it seemed like a party every day at our house). And, obviously, I’ve heard her in the Hotel Transylvania movies.
Playing Emily Dickinson is quite a departure from work like that. Shannon is a good actress, perfectly capable of playing non-comedic roles, but she’s rarely cast in them. So Emily Dickinson seemed like a puzzling choice for her…until I saw the movie.
I knew from the trailer that Wild Nights with Emily presents her not as a tormented recluse afraid to publish, but as a relatively happy lesbian who tried very hard to get her poems in print. In the days leading up to my screening, I kept thinking, “I need to do more research about Dickinson before I watch this movie.”
I’ve read her poems for pleasure. I’ve scrawled them in the margins of my journals. I’ve presented them to my daughter as riddles we could solve together. (I’ve sung them to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”) I’ve encountered them in classes I took and classes I taught. But I’ve never studied her in any depth. My M.A. is in British literature, and my (unfinished) dissertation was about the Elizabethan complaint poem, so Dickinson is well outside my area of expertise. (And I assume the exact nature of her relationship with her sister-in-law is outside most people’s area of expertise. Emily and Susan are the only experts there surely, although the movie makes a good case for believing the account of the niece/daughter who passed multiple messages between them every day.)
Still, because I have a background in literature, I thought, “I’ve got to learn everything I can about recent Dickinson scholarship in the next few days, so I can go into this movie prepared to evaluate its claims.”
But instead I spent my free time crawling through a field of wildflowers trying to sneak up on bees. I feel like Emily Dickinson would approve of my lifestyle choices, and besides, much like one of her poems, Wild Nights with Emily gives you everything you need to enjoy it.
The Good:
This movie is like watching a history project put together by a very witty group of high school or college students. It’s well made and moving, but it’s definitely a comedy that revels in the absurd. It isn’t trying to be a stuffy period piece.
It wants to tell an honest story about Dickinson, to correct our mistaken impression of how she lived. But you would never watch and think, “It’s like I’m being transported to 1850s Amherst! Oh, the authenticity!”
This has more the vibe of Epic Rap Battles of History (though it’s more in tune with its subject than most of those). It’s also a little bit like
A Knight’s Tale, a film that did not attempt to recreate every detail accurately, but rather tried to contemporize a medieval sensibility.
You watch Wild Nights and feel you’re getting a lot of facts and a good sense of the artist’s work, but you know what you’re being shown isn’t “the truth.”
And see, that’s the thing. Historical films never show us the truth. Every narrative is constructed. Even work trying to be painstakingly accurate is always giving us somebody’s version of the events. Why would we be able to tell “the truth” about the past? We can’t even come up with a consensus of what’s going on in the present moment. (If you don’t believe me, I dare you to watch a few minutes of just three or four different news channels and then tell me succinctly what in the world is going on today.)
So Wild Nights with Emily is definitely a revisionist project, presenting us with a compelling (alternate) reading of Emily Dickinson’s life. This version does not hide the fact that it’s leaning into every opportunity for comedy. It doesn’t pretend that it is telling you the absolutely true story of Emily Dickinson. But that seems like a strategy to make the scenario it presents (ironically) more convincing. Because the more standard take on Dickinson’s life is usually presented as absolutely true. And how could anybody know for sure? These are all just narratives we’re constructing after the fact based on the evidence available to us.
This may or may not be the true story of Dickinson’s life, but it is definitely the true story of somebody’s life (probably many people’s). Essentially, this is the story of every frustrated artist, every patronized woman, everybody who lives outside the box. The way Dickinson’s work is completely misunderstood by her contemporaries is easy to sympathize with. This aspect of the story is so intensely familiar that it’s as much a trope as “Dickinson the recluse.” Wild Nights with Emily gives us Dickinson the literary genius, misunderstood in her own time.
Every writer can sympathize with the frustration Emily feels when the gatekeepers of the literary world of her day completely misunderstand her work. And it’s pretty easy to see why they really don’t get her. She doesn’t live the way that people expect, and she doesn’t say the things that people are used to hearing. The movie gives us a clear sense of what is going wrong. The fault lies not with Dickinson but with those observing her and publicizing their impressions. She is a genius. The problem is that everyone else is an idiot.
I’m sure we’ve all felt that way about the everyone elses in our own lives at one time or another. The harsh reality is that far too often we’re among the idiotic everyone elses, but the satisfying fantasy that we’re in the know is what this movie focuses on.
Anybody who lives (even marginally) outside of cultural norms can feel a kinship with Dickinson’s plight in this film. Anybody who has ever tried to communicate a message to a wider audience has at some point felt a rising sense of dismay that everyone is a moron. Society likes the familiar.
Imagine daring to show your painting to an audience for the first time.
“No, no, your work isn’t good,” they say condescendingly, “because an apple should be succulent, red and round!”
After a beat of confusion, you protest in frustration, “But this a banana!”
And they stare at you, glazed-eyed, and laugh, “No! No!”
Wild Nights is a movie about that experience. It’s fun to watch because it taps into that frustrated feeling and assures us that we’re in good company. We’re like Emily Dickinson. We get it. Nobody else gets it.
I know this feeling well. Sometimes people will never understand. Maybe they’re not capable of understanding. Maybe they refuse to understand. Either way, doomed efforts to make them understand become draining and demoralizing.
Once during a college break, I went to a church Bible study class with a friend. While we were discussing how the Nicene Creed had been built from the need to refute specific heresies, my friend said, “I wonder which things we believe now will turn out to be like some of these rejected doctrines in the future.” One of the ladies in the class told her, with an air of helpful condescension, “Oh no, those were heresies, and now we believe the truth.” It took several minutes of pointless conversation before I realized that the woman was not pretending not to understand her. She genuinely did not understand. Nobody in the class seemed to understand. It made me want to go back to school immediately, to escape from the lazy, uncomprehending banality of the normal world. My friend’s fantastic question was totally wasted on her audience. (And, incidentally, she was not trying to antagonize anyone. She is now a nun.)
Another time in college, I attended a friend’s dinner party where I happened to remark innocuously to a guest who asked about my work that I had recently been surprised to discover that most of Shakespeare’s Sonnets were written to a man. The girl was affronted. “I don’t believe that!” she snapped icily. Her stress on the word that made it clear that I had touched on a subject which had long affronted her. Fortunately for the success of my friend’s dinner party, the girl was far more invested in not hearing the truth than I was in caring. Though I began to feel like a cornered Galileo, I remained politely vague during her ensuing ignorant tirade.
But honestly, that girl can be forgiven for not knowing Shakespeare wrote the first 126 sonnets to a fair youth, begging him to procreate because Victorian editors had a field day “improving” the Sonnets. So often in the nineteenth century, editors changed the masculine pronouns to feminine ones, making the poems more suitable for and palatable to readers of the day. (Some of their commentary is just as bonkers as you could possibly imagine, too!) And these are the same people (not only of mindset but of era) who “improved” all of Dickinson’s poems. What’s crazy and annoying about some of these overzealous editors is they often appear not to understand the work they are “improving.” Sometimes their hysteria about suggestive passages results from their misunderstanding of the text in the first place. They are often in the business of shielding the public from indecencies that do not actually exist outside of their own minds (kind of like the time when I was twelve and my mother came across a word she didn’t know in a book. “Maybe I know,” I said, trying to be helpful. But she wouldn’t tell me the sentence “Men with hubris as big as barns” until she looked up hubris in the dictionary first. Immediately afterward, we both laughed hysterically about it.)
This film is pretty unsympathetic to Mabel Loomis Todd (delightfully played by Amy Seimetz), the editor of several early posthumous editions of Dickinson’s poetry. That’s actually a massive understatement. The film paints her as a conniving imbecile and makes a good case that this “expert” on Dickinson knew nothing about her and completely misunderstood her work (perhaps in some ways deliberately and maliciously). I will say this for Todd, though. Even the obnoxiously flawed version of her presented by this film has the sense to realize Dickinson’s material is good and the know-how to get audiences of the day to read and applaud it.
Even more stupid and frustrating than Todd, though, is every male character in the entire movie. If you’re often beset by mansplaining and chauvinism, then you’re going to love the way these men treat Emily Dickinson. It’s not that these men are stupid. (Well, okay, a lot of them do appear to be extremely slow.) It’s that the supposed advocates and champions of women know absolutely nothing about women, yet speak for them. The experts on poetry have no taste. The respected minds of the day can’t even keep the plots of novels straight. All of this male bashing is pretty heavy-handed, but still, it engenders a familiar sensation that is pleasant to recall in like company. The point is not that these guys are men. It’s that they’re in charge. By emphasizing how the male gatekeepers of society fail completely to understand women or their work, the movie does clearly show us why a profoundly mistaken impression of Dickinson could have persisted for so long. And it makes us feel better if society is currently failing to recognize our genius.
Both Molly Shannon and Susan Ziegler are fantastic in this film. I was particularly impressed by Ziegler because I’m largely unfamiliar with her work. (Shannon is great, too, but I expected to like her.) This film definitely shows us an authentic life. Whether it’s Emily Dickinson’s authentic life, I’m not qualified to say. My husband was the only man in the theater–kind of like when we watched Magic Mike–and he definitely had the sense again that he was observing the in-group from the outside. So often, the laughter in the theater sounded like the non-verbal equivalent of, “Oh yeah! I’ve been there!” It was like hearing sympathetic, amused “amens” in a Southern church.
Despite the movie’s embrace of zany comedy, it does give us a lot of verifiable, factual material about Dickinson. We get a good idea of her temperament, her views on life and literature, her poetry. And if what it says about Dickinson’s niece is true, and if the name Susan appears as many times in her writing as the film suggests, then I find its revised version of Dickinson pretty believable. (I know the name Susan was erased from her writing. I just don’t know how many times it actually appeared.)
But even if this is not an accurate depiction of Dickinson’s life (and it may be), it’s still an accurate depiction of someone’s life. I guarantee there are a lot of couples out there who have a dynamic eerily similar to Emily and Susan. And there are lots of frustrated writers out there facing the same kinds of roadblocks as Emily. This is a real way to live, a real way to exist. That’s one thing I find so compelling about the movie, the authenticity of its character interactions. (Jackie Monahan, Brett Gelman, and Kevin Seal give winning performances, too.)
The movie is also extremely funny (sometimes laugh out loud funny), and it made me want to go home and read every line of Emily Dickinson’s poetry as soon as I possibly could.
Wild Nights with Emily dedicates itself to conveying truth in all its absurdity, and it succeeds marvelously.
Best Scene:
I almost fell on the floor laughing during Emily’s scene with the judge. I was surprised by the intensity of my amusement. It really shouldn’t have been quite as funny as it was, but I laughed so hard. I just kept going through the motions of laughter even after I ran out of breath. His summary of “Brontë novel” is funny enough (if a bit expected), but when he tells her the point of the story, I died. Shannon’s reactions are hilarious throughout this scene, and the way the whole thing is edited, presented along with the commentary of Amy Seimetz punctuates the situation’s full potential for comedy.
I also intensely love the conversation about Emily’s white dress.
Best Scene Visually:
I love the way that we see the words of Dickinson’s poems on the screen as Shannon speaks them and even after she stops speaking. Visually, the segment about Emily’s death and its aftermath is so striking. Although somewhat jarring, the scene in the grave makes an impression. And the side-by-side comparison of Susan & Emily and Mabel basically gives us the entire movie in one image. The lowering/not lowering of the basket is effective, too.
Best Action Sequence:
It’s hard not to love Mabel’s various escapades at the piano, though I feel I’m being unfair to her by letting myself be drawn in and amused.
The Negatives:
It’s extremely hard to find fault with this film because though it does some bizarre things, it always does them intentionally. It’s like the film version of Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club. It’s weird. It knows it’s weird. It not only embraces its weirdness, it basks in it, revels in it. If you call it out for being weird, it gets weirder on purpose just to see if it can make you uncomfortable because that’s fun.
It’s pretty hard to call the movie out for anything because though I can point to some conspicuously strange scenes, I can’t honestly say that I didn’t enjoy them.
I do find it strange that given the film’s clear goal of defending Emily from being dismissed as an unhinged, addle-brained spinster, it is perfectly willing to throw her sister Lavinia under the bus. Emily is a worthy person. She cannot be so lightly dismissed, so basely misunderstood and slandered…but Lavinia can! Because it’s funny!!!! If this film is to be believed, Emily loved to read Charlotte Brontë , and Lavinia was written by Jane Austen! Though Jackie Monahan is great in the role, she’s seriously like a vexing supporting character in Pride and Prejudice, and she’s not the only one. This movie recovers a more realistic version of Emily Dickinson even as it mercilessly skewers and satirizes everyone else around her.
Again, though, I find it odd to complain about this since the film is presenting all the characters that way to make a point. Everyone said Emily was weird? Well, that’s because they were weird! It’s a clever way of dramatizing the disconnect between Dickinson and her gossiping, small-minded contemporaries. Maybe people did find her odd, but consider them from her point of view.
The movie feels like a history report on Dickinson dressed up by an improv troupe just as committed to finding the every possible opportunity for humor in the story as to informing the audience that there is another way of understanding Emily Dickinson. It really does use verifiable facts to give us an important message about Emily and Susan, but it also wants to make us laugh at any time it possibly can.
And that is one small complaint I do have. Some moments are clearly exaggerated for comedic value. Some particularly absurd elements may even be fabricated just to make us laugh. But which elements are these? It’s extremely hard to know because human behavior is genuinely so absurd. When told the right way, completely true, factual events from history sound like plotlines from a ludicrous soap opera. But this movie is trying to correct our mistaken view of Dickinson and convince us that we have been misinformed about her life. So what is true? Even though the movie makes a convincing case, we still need to do further research before embracing its account whole-heartedly.
Then again, movies don’t exist to teach history. Even if Wild Nights were a completely serious, stuffy period drama, we would still need to do further research to get a grasp of whatever events from history it depicts. People skip that step a lot. The popular tendency is to watch Braveheart and think, “Well, now I know all there is to know about William Wallace and Edward I and II. No need to read any books!” So at least this movie is honest about being a movie.
The only other thing is that around the time of Emily’s death, there’s a pronounced tonal shift. Her scene in the grave seems like it’s part of a different project. We were watching an improv troupe. Now we’re watching an experimental stage play. But even though I find this turn jarring and curious, I must admit that I also found it entertaining and engaging. I feel the movie got weird at this juncture, but I liked it, so…?
Overall:
While watching Wild Nights with Emily, I kept remembering the time when I was seven and suddenly got out of bed at 2:00 in the morning and started playing with my toys. “Come on,” I said to my two-year-old sister, taking her out of bed and setting her on the floor beside me, “let’s play. Don’t worry. I just realized bedtime is only something people made up. We can really do things any time we want.” The look on her face! I’ve seen it so many times, that “What are you doing, you maniac? You are going to get us in so much trouble!” look. And, indeed, our mom did come in and put us back to bed. But why am I wrong? (Before artificial light, everyone went to bed at dusk? Tell that to owls!)
Obviously this unlikely Emily Dickinson rom-com tapped into something that resonates with me. The movie is only 84 minutes long, and I can’t seem to stop writing about it and recalling personal anecdotes! The movie is odd, I’ll admit, but it’s consistently funny and engenders a desire to read Dickinson. I thought it was great.
