Dickinson (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

Wow! I loved Apple+’s original show, DICKINSON, starring the great Hailee Steinfeld as the American poet, Emily Dickinson. It’s audacious! Risky. Like a reworking of Little House On The Prairie as a YA novel. It has the youngsters, including Dickinson, speaking in a young contemporary vernacular while the elders speak in solemn period tones; and it’s scored with contemporary songs and music. So when, in the opening ep, BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP, Dickinson takes a ride in her imaginary coach with Death, the journey is accompanied by Billie Eilish singing BURY A FRIEND. But, of course. And it works perfectly.

David Gordon Green directed the first ep and uses it to atone for his recent retooling of HALLOWEEN, reminding us of the promise he showed in his 2000 debut, GEORGE WASHINGTON. Hailee Steinfeld is a great actress. So good and right as Mattie Ross in the Coen’s TRUE GRIT; here she channels something of that character’s pluck and conviction and adds a touch of Jo March from Little Women to give us an Emily who is smart, knowing, sexual, trapped, funny, certain.

I wrote a story idea once of Jo March and Mattie Ross, who were alive as fictional characters in roughly the same part of the mid-nineteenth century, teaming up to go on an adventure together. Well, now I want them to take Emily Dickinson along for the ride.

DICKINSON is brilliant and irreverent and somehow conspires to reveal the inner and outer life of this most influential and seminal of American poets with a death-obsession; a poet who was barely published in her lifetime and yet has achieved a kind of immortality. As Emily says in her final words of ep 1, when she finds a way to complete her (famous) poem, Because I Could Not Stop For Death, “nailed it.”