Emily Review: Frances O’Connor’s Brontë Biopic Bristles Against Revisionist Tendencies

Emily takes advantage of the leeway for speculation afforded by its subject’s reclusive nature.

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Emily
Photo: Bleecker Street

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights might be the cruelest classic in the literary canon, a gothic tragedy that funnels its reader through layers of nested narration into a fever dream of cyclic trauma, revenge, and self-destructive monomania. What little we know about its author is largely filtered through the words of her longer-lived, more prolific sister, Charlotte. Frances O’Connor’s biopic Emily takes advantage of the leeway for speculation afforded by her subject’s reclusive nature, back-engineering a fictional version of her life story from the features of her only novel and infusing it with the same despairing mood.

The film may not be the matryoshka doll that is Wuthering Heights, but it does make use of one nested narrative: Just before succumbing to tuberculosis, Emily reflects on the experiences that inspired her to write the novel in an extended flashback. Everything that follows is understood to be colored by the act of writing. Imputing what we see to Emily’s subjectivity, limited as it is by historical circumstance, lets the film off the hook for framing her life as a doomed love story.

Emily deemphasizes the fraught relations between Emily (Emma Mackey) and her sisters, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and Anne (Amelia Gething). Charlotte is harshly depicted as Emily’s controlling and judgmental artistic rival, while the childish Anne is consigned to the periphery. O’Connor devotes more imagination to Emily’s formative friendship with her brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), a rebellious painter and addict, and to a secret love affair with a young curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). The tragic aftermath of both entanglements leads to her writing Wuthering Heights and, shortly thereafter, death.

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In a scene that typifies O’Connor’s approach, Charlotte, Anne, Branwell, William, and Emily are playing with a mask. When her turn comes around, Emily dons the mask and begins to channel the ghost of their dead mother as a gale from the moors blows the window open. After the impromptu séance upsets her sisters and incurs the disapproval of William, she buries the mask in the garden and we get a POV shot from the mask’s perspective as clods of soil hammer down and blacken the lens. This would suggest that the mask is in fact supernatural, or that Emily believes this so fervently that it amounts to the same thing. Impressionistic, unconcerned with strict biographical accuracy, such gothic flourishes make Emily more than just a by-the-numbers biopic, namely by inhabiting the subject’s morbid fascination with death and haunting.

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Rather than rely on monotonous digital filters in an ill-advised attempt at tonal consistency, cinematographer Nanu Segal makes dramatic use of natural light, and the lack thereof, to bring out the brooding dawns and ink-black nights of the moors that Emily immortalized in Wuthering Heights. In one striking sequence, she’s waiting in a ruined cottage for William to arrive. She looks out through a narrow window and from her point of view we see him at a distance, striding through waves of grass. She turns away and then looks back, several times, so that William appears closer each time. This subjective drawing-out and savoring of his approach not only recalls the POV shot from the mask’s perspective, but it also evokes, in its framing, Romantic paintings of solitary figures dwarfed by landscapes of sublime indifference.

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With Emily, O’Connor doesn’t follow the prevailing revisionist trend in biopics and costume dramas where modern-day political attitudes are transposed onto the past, teasing out instead a resonance between the Romanticism of the Brontës’ time and the more drastic individualism of our own. She paints her characters’ sensibility as a reaction against Enlightenment strictures, at once invigorating and naïve, not yet fully aware of the dark paths to despair and isolation down which valorization of the self can lead. Mackey’s portrayal finds real pathos in Emily as a sort of pioneer in the contradictions of Romanticism, which gave rise to and still inform our contemporary restlessness—isolated, sensitive, buffeted by stormy impulses.

Edited as to suggest that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights practically overnight, the film’s ending feels rushed, almost an afterthought. It also threatens to undermine Emily’s imaginativeness by presenting its eponymous figure’s accomplishment as a mere extrapolation of life events. Another way to read it, though, would be to see Emily’s novel as finding the sublime in the tragic, a transcendence of the mortality that hounded her. Either way, faced with a reflection of ourselves in Emily that doesn’t erase the historical distance between us, it’s easy to forgive.

Score: 
 Cast: Emma Mackey, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Fionn Whitehead, Alexandra Dowling, Amelia Gething, Adrian Dunbar  Director: Frances O’Connor  Screenwriter: Frances O’Connor  Distributor: Bleecker Street  Running Time: 130 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

1 Comment

  1. I don’t agree that it’s easy to forgive. Why on earth did Frances O’Connor believe she had to create this fictional biopic of Emily Brontë? I mean . . . it could have easily been some flawed, yet decent Victorian melodrama, while not trying to pass off as some kind of biopic. And the fact that O’Connor had to nearly demonize Charlotte Brontë and dismiss Anne Brontë in the process, is nearly repellent to me. What a waste of time!

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