Photo © Tempo Productions Ltd.
Emma Mackey in 'Emily'
Emma Mackey in 'Emily'
Emily Brontë lived most of her life in a remote parsonage overlooking the rainy Yorkshire moors. She was largely homeschooled in a house of books. Death was her family’s constant companion, yet her siblings included painter-writer brother Branwell and a pair of poet sisters, Charlotte and Anne. Charlotte also wrote Jane Eyre. Emily exceeded that accomplishment with the publication of her enduring novel, Wuthering Heights.
The record of Emily’s life is sketchy, so it’s no crime for a contemporary filmmaker to fill in and color the white spaces—if the coloring is accomplished with the care for known facts shown in writer-director Frances O’Connor’s Emily. Her screenplay adheres to the main characters in Emily’s restricted circle and imagines a crucial role for one, her father’s new understudy at the village church, Michael Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Did Emily really fall in love with the handsome young cleric, himself a poet? Biographers will never know but storytellers are free to wonder.
Emma Mackey gives a credible performance as Emily, investing the young woman with a nervous, curious disposition. In real life, Charlotte described her as “a solitude loving raven, no gentle dove”; Mackey endows Emily with the discomfort of a creative woman with limited prospects coupled with the intangibles of the nature and nurture that formed her character. She may have been agoraphobic at times—her emotions an inner world of turmoil. She must have been as frustrated as a fish circling a landlocked pond with no outlet to the sea.
Emily is a plausible account of Brontë family dynamics. Her father, the vicar (Adrian Dunbar), is stern but caring. Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) is a second-hand Byron, dashing and full of himself. The sisters lived in imaginary worlds of their own storytelling. The Brontës loved and clashed with each other.
Wuthering Heights was eye opening, even scandalous when first published in 1847 for its frank exploration of romantic obsession. How does the film explore the inspiration behind the novel, a classic that not only spawned several movie adaptations but inaugurated a subgenre of gothic romance concerning troubled male protagonists (Daphne du Maurier-Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca)? Emily catches the rainy environs of the Yorkshire moors (some frames suggest John Constable’s drearier landscapes), the creative energy crackling between the siblings, the dreamy summer afternoons well suited for daydreaming—and hints at the household’s high degree of literacy. A forbidden love affair that culminated in tragedy? Perhaps.
Emily is screening at Marcus South Shore Cinema, the Oriental Theatre and AMC Mayfair.
