Bleecker Street
Everyone knows that Jane Austen was the prolific, well-loved one with a million adaptations to her name. But everyone also knows that the women born a few years after Jane Austen died, the three Brontë sisters — Emily, Charlotte, and Anne — were the actual cool ones. Sadly I can only claim knowledge of Charlotte’s great novel Jane Eyre, which had the great quality of helping me score highly on my high school AP test. Still, I have yet to see a great adaptation of that book either, while great adaptations of Austen abound (including ones about her). Perhaps this one was due.
Emily comes from writer/director Frances O’Connor (a character actress for many years) in her directorial debut. The movie tells the story of much of the life of Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey from the great show Sex Education), from her youth until her untimely death at only thirty years old. Emily is known for writing the famed novel Wuthering Heights, and much of the movie seems to try to answer the question: Why did she write it, and where did it all come from?
We start the movie with Emily as a sort of outsider even in her own family, caught up in her own creative worlds, and seemingly disinterested in the pragmatic. At the same time, she has little regard or understanding of what might disturb others — in a particularly fraught scene, during a game where she and her siblings wear masks and are meant to pretend to be someone else (a classic game still played today in different ways), Emily claims to be possessed to be the spirit of their late mother.
This is never resolved, although the lack of anything supernatural elsewhere makes it unlikely it’s about anything real. Emily and her brother Bramwell (Fionn Whitehead) both have trouble connecting with the real world and their theoretical responsibilities as respectable members of society — instead, the two bond and sneak off together to be peeping toms or otherwise troubling things.
Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), is the more stable one of the group, but she constantly frets about her siblings getting lost. But this is all driven by her deep love for them. It’s all complicated by the arrival of William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the new local clergyman who immediately begins getting involved in the Brontë family’s lives (the man definitely did exist, although historians disagree about how he was connected to the Brontë family).
The big jump in the movie happens when sparks fly between Emily and William, and the two pursue an ill-planned, ill-fated romance that has enough chemistry you almost understand why it happened. But we know things aren’t going well — the movie starts with Emily’s deathbed, after all, so the question is how things will fall apart.
The movie has a fairly steady hand for a newcomer filmmaker, and although it’s not exactly the best movie of its type I’ve seen, it’s impressive work for a first timer. Of course, the understandable highlight here is Emma Mackey as Emily Brontë, who is already so compelling on Sex Education that it’s understandable how easily she slips into this entirely different, but still compelling role.
There is a bit of padding here, as often the film seems to struggle to fill its allotted time effectively, but when things are the most interesting (like the aforementioned mask scene), it’s definitely engrossing in a positive way. Certainly interesting to see Emma Mackey expanding her career with her first lead role here, and such an interesting historical figure too — it’s a different enough character than any of the few roles she’s played before (she was also one of the few highlights of the messy Death on the Nile) that I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Emily has a run time of 2 hours 10 minutes and is rated R for some sexuality/nudity and drug use.
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