The
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris, Globe Staff
10/24/02
Homage revises Dickinson image
Somehow, time has made a few curious adjustments to the myth of Emily Dickinson. Nearly a century after her demise, she was the nice poet. She was the serene poet. She was the sad, lonely, unlucky, tragically unsexed poet.
All these faces and more of Dickinson appear in Steve Gentile and Jim Wolpaw's ''Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson''- a brisk, often brilliantly funny documentary. It's sort of about the trouble with academic interpretation and sort of about the inadequacies of the documentary as a format for working that trouble out. In its well-built, vaguely self-searching but scholastically based approach, the film plays like Ross McElwee of ''Sherman's March'' trying to make one of Peter Greenway's early prankumentaries.
Wolpaw apparently started with a more conventional documentary about the poet. After a dream in which he saw Dickinson playing baseball, however, he changed his approach. We see his dream, parts of what's said to be his original film, and the casting calls for the actresses who could play Dickinson. (He got a black Emily, a blotchy Emily, a Phoebe Cates-looking Emily.)
The enterprise is never less than contrived. Wolpaw seems as much as a construct as his beloved, misread Belle of Amherst. ''Loaded Gun'' doesn't require a prior passion for the subject or her work to find any of this entertaining, just a willingness to watch a host of Dickinson diehards change the bulb in their idol's halo.
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