“How did you write Wuthering Heights?” Charlotte
“I took my pen and put it to paper,” Emily (Emma Mackey)
“There is something more, something you are hiding from me.” Charlotte
“Something more” is what new bio "Emily" explores. It’s not about Emily Dickenson, but it could very well be. Like the secretive poet, a reclusive artist of the 19th century, Emily Bronte is the subject of this lovely and imaginative film as it imagines a more robust life than the demur novelist lived, one where we could see the intimations of her gothic romance, Wuthering Heights, in the tumult of a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors and a love to mold fictionally into Heathcliff, the troubled hero of the novel—one of the greatest ever penned in English.
Frances O’Connor, an actress for thirty years turned writer and director and Emma Mackey doing a stormy star turn as Emily help create a memorable biography that stands proudly beside the recent Bright Star (2009) and A Quiet Passion (2016). Not to be forgotten are Devotion (1946) with Ida Lupino as Emily and The Bronte Sisters (1979) with Isabelle Adjani as Emily. The role brings out the best in actresses, More so with Mackey, whose face was born to be in front of a camera.
No one who has walked the moors of Yorkshire parish and drank in the Haworth pub can deny the influence the barren landscape and fast-running ale could affect any of Emily and Charlotte’s romantic characters. Being daughters of curate Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), the ladies and other sister, lesser artist Anne, can dream only of being teachers, hardly acclaimed writers. Alas, they can dream of being artists, about the only worthy profession open to them as long as they assume masculine names.
Although this cinematic take is rife with poetic license, the spirit of that dynamic family and its artistic children, includes dissolute artist, brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), with whose incestuous yearnings O’Connor titillates the audience. The brooding landscape, captured in clouds and perpetual rain by cinematographer Nanu Segal, could have turned Emily into a brooding, rebellious writer of a classic novel for all times.
O’Connor’s romantic curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), impossibly handsome, and Emily engage in tempestuous romance to rival that of Cathy and Heathcliff of WH fame. This “Emily” is brimming with sensibility and chaos, also conditions that have turned Charlotte into the world-class author of Jane Eyre. What a family!
Emily
Director: Frances O’Connor
Screenplay: O’Connor
Cast: Emma Mackey (Barbie)
Run Time: 2h 10m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
