Cynthia Nixon Plays Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion

If you’re going to make a film about the great, reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson, you’d be smart to cast Cynthia Nixon — despite the fact that Dickinson was famously homely and Nixon is clearly anything but.

Just the same, Nixon’s legacy as Miranda on Sex and the City seems to have destined her to play smart women of unorthadox beauty (such as her Eleanor Roosevelt in Warm Springs). But nowhere has she done it better than in A Quiet Passion. Director Terence Davies shows us Dickinson through a personal lens of the family life she clung to so tenaciously, offering Keith Carradine and Jennifer Ehle dual opportunities to shine as Emily’s father and sister. THE WORD: The real star here is language: both marvelously canny dialogue and eloquent quotes from the poet herself, which seem to almost become part of the film’s score. WHERE TO WATCH: In Theaters