Review: Molly Shannon plays a lesbian Emily Dickinson for laughs. Half the time it works.
Molly Shannon, left, and Susan Ziegler in “Wild Nights With Emily.” By Pat Padua May 7 at 11:00 AM Rating:
Such physical comedy is at odds with other scenes in which the character is taken much more seriously: as a gay writer whose goal of publication was frustrated by men. Writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson — Emily’s literary mentor, who published her poetry only after her death — is shown performing heavy “surgery,” as she calls it, to make her verse’s often eccentric punctuation conform to convention.
There are issues of serious literary scholarship and biography here that might benefit from a more straight-faced approach, but Olnek opts to make them go down easy, with a light storytelling tone and a style of cinematography that avoids the soft-focus approach of similar period pieces. For the most part, “Wild Nights” looks and feels like a TV sitcom.
But if such jokes often work, the drama more frequently doesn’t. One scene, in which Emily recites “I died for Beauty — but was scarce” — a poem in which the writer imagines her own death — turns into a heavy-handed dialogue between the poet and a slave.
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