Variety's carolineframke on Apple TV's Dickinson: 'If at one point Emily (played by executive producer Hailee Steinfeld) emerged from her stately Amherst home in a Forever 21 shirt emblazoned with “FEMINIST,” it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising'
’s life complete with bass-heavy needle drops and hallucinations of Death as a man with a Cheshire Cat smirk . For all the big creative swings the new Apple TV Plus series takes, it feels suspended between several different approaches without committing to a single one. It’s not a comedy, nor a drama, nor even quite a “dramedy.” It’s at least adjacent to a teen show in the vein of a high school series you might find on the CW, until it’s not. It’s not parody, nor entirely sincere.
From creator Alena Smith, “Dickinson” feels like the logical conclusion to well over a decade of content inspired — whether directly or through cultural osmosis — by movies like the jousting comedy “A Knight’s Tale” or Sofia Coppola’s decadent “Marie Antoinette” . While novel at first in retrospect, those films’ gambits of humanizing a previously untouchable historical figure by re-contextualizing them through modern manners and music has proved incredibly influential.
These relationships are all by and large accurate to Dickinson’s real life, though the pivotal one between Emily and her overbearing father, whom she lived with all her life, doesn’t make much of any sense the way it unfolds onscreen. “Dickinson” also makes the choice to make the queer subtext between Emily and Sue text — though in truth, Dickinson described the lifelong love between the two real women in stark enough terms throughout her poetry that the word “subtext” is only barely applicable.
In fact, their acting saves many moments that “Dickinson” otherwise drowns in distracting stylistic flourishes. Maybe the most frustrating part of the first few episodes is how close they get to connecting Emily’s spirit to that of her poetry before losing the thread. The best episode is — not coincidentally, for aforementioned chemistry reasons — the one that draws the strongest line between a poem about volcanoes to the strength of Emily’s feelings for Sue.
Given the show’s scattered narrative and stylistic approach to Emily’s life and work, its biggest strength by a long shot is its star. Steinfeld’s Emily is a close cousin of her “Edge of Seventeen” character, who was also furious and intelligent beyond her years . “Furious and intelligent” is a space in which Steinfeld, somehow still an underrated actor despite her early Oscar nomination for “True Grit,” excels.
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