Review: Wild Nights with Emily Playfully and Necessarily Reimagines Dickinson’s Story

“Emily Dickinson wished to be published posthumously,” Mabel Loomis Todd (Amy Seimetz) lectures to a female audience in Wild Nights with Emily. Todd was Dickinson’s first editor and promulgated the self-serving myth that she was the one to “discover” a trove of poems in a bedside chest in the Dickinson family home. Cheekily, writer-director Madeleine Olnek’s film cuts to Dickinson (Molly Shannon) decades before, digging in the garden, as if preparing her own tiny grave from which to enjoy her post-death fame. There’s something fairly obvious about the film’s “unreliable narrator” shtick—throughout, Todd tells us one thing, the camera the opposite—but Olnek’s acute, feminism-inflected irony keeps the trope from feeling like a crutch.

The point, of course, is that Dickinson’s legacy has been distorted, at this point for well over a century, by Todd’s mendacity, which was fueled in equal measure by her personal ambition and her Victorian prudery. Historical indications that Dickinson may have been in a lifelong relationship with her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson (played in the film by Susan Ziegler), were granted credence in the 1990s when new imaging technologies revealed that someone—likely Todd—erased Susan’s name from erotic letters and several poems penned by Dickinson. Wild Nights with Emily extrapolates from this still-emerging evidence a story of a collaborative romantic partnership, two women who found a private space for themselves within the secluded confines of upper-class New England.

Olnek’s comedy does two favors to Dickinson: First, it reclaims one of few women poets firmly in the literary canon as a distinctly queer voice, and second, it revitalizes a corpus of poems familiar to every American schoolchild. The film contextualizes Dickinson’s works within the life of a woman secretly devoted to another woman, bridging its scenes with montages over which characters intone some of her best-known work—much of which, the film argues, was intended for Susan’s eyes first or exclusively. Despite the seriousness of its intent, Wild Nights with Emily always strikes a playful tone; the most memorable of these poem-montages proposes that the poet composed her “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” in the meter of the folk ballad “The Yellow Rose of Texas” because Todd, also the lover of Emily’s brother, Austin (Kevin Seal), , was playing the folk ballad on the family piano as the poet was writing.

The droll tone of that sequence, which sees the members of the main cast brightly singing the gloomy poem while addressing the camera directly, is Wild Nights with Emily in a nutshell, as the film is committed to irreverently disregarding standard biopic-isms and clichés about suffering artists. Throughout, Olnek’s screenplay filters the patrician diction of the 19th-century Massachusetts upper crust through the codes of neurotic indie comedy. At one point, a smash cut brings us from the Dickinson household to the Civil War battlefront, where the editor of the Atlantic, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman), pedantically enumerates his professional experience editing poems and championing abolitionism in response to a question. The reverse angle shows a small assemblage of unimpressed black troops. “No,” one of them says, “I meant, what is your military experience?”

Introduced here, Higginson will prove to be one of the antagonists in Emily Dickinson’s life, characterized as a self-styled woke bro who offers her patronizing advice instead of taking her work seriously. He’s one of several men the film ridicules for preventing Dickinson’s recognition before her death. He’s also part of the film’s farcical treatment of most characters who aren’t Emily or Susan: Austin is a mediocre bourgeois outmatched by the clever women around him; Emily’s sister, Lavinia (Jackie Monahan), is a mildly insane cat lady; and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Robert McCaskill) speaks with a quiet rasp that forces party guests to incline their entire bodies toward him in order to hear what he says. Olnek’s staging of interiors emphasizes the film’s sardonic stance toward Dickinson’s society. The camera often maintains a dry distance from the characters, highlighting their sparse, blandly lit, stage-like settings.

The film’s playful tone can be understood as a corrective to a century of Dickinson scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto her, combining Victorian ideals of femininity with the romantic image of the solitary poet. One might argue that Olnek’s consistently farcical take on Dickinson’s life represents something of an overcorrection, but it helps that Wild Nights with Emily is also consistently funny. The dramatic tonal shift may be necessary to replace the persistent image of Dickinson as a timid recluse unlucky in love with that of a queer woman with a (relatively) healthy social life, with ultimately thwarted ambitions to be recognized—not at all posthumously—as a serious poet.