What if Emily Bronte, the author of “Wuthering Heights” and painfully shy daughter of a parson, secretly had a steamy love affair with her father’s assistant? Could have happened, right?
Well, no, but the highly imaginative historical drama EMILY posits such a hidden romance. EMILY is less a biography than a fantasy of the life the director might have wished the author had, something more possible now than then.
EMILY is the latest in a series of historical dramas that posit a secret love life for a famous unmarried female 19th century author. While such what-if romances might be fun, this one goes pretty far from the factual, in the romance imagined and other acts of rebellious behavior. However, where the film has more depth is in its other aspect, a speculative inner progression from shy, reclusive girl to a woman with artistic and intellectual freedom, that kind of transformation one might imagine for the author of “Wuthering Heights.”
The historical record on the author’s actual life is scant, and even contradictory, and that lack of information opens the door for director/writer Frances O’Connor’s imagined drama tinged with Gothic romance about the author of that classic Gothic romance “Wuthering Heights.” This R-rated drama is pretty steamy stuff, which will likely please romance fans. On the other hand, the film also creates a journey towards artistic and intellectual freedom, although again the steps on that journey are also far more contemporary than anything likely for a parson’s daughter in the Victorian era.
Director/writer Frances O’Connor finds the perfect partner in her goals for this film in Emma Mackey. Mackey portrays Emily Bronte as she evolves from a painfully shy girl, stricken with grief by the death of her mother, to a woman very much her own person, wild and free, and ready to write her famous novel. Deeply mourning her mother, Emily struggles with the strictures of the Victorian world placed on women, and against her own family. She rebels against her disapproving older sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), and her strict pastor father (Adrian Dunbar). Considered odd by the villagers in their Yorkshire town, Emily finds more support from her sister Anne (Amelia Gething) but especially from her wild, rule-breaking brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). Emily’s quest for intellectual and artistic freedom draws her to a visiting pastor, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen).
The drama also features Gemma Jones as Aunt Branwell. The acting is very good throughout, and everything about the film seems polished, although the pacing slows from time to time. Rather than covering the whole of her short life, this story takes place between the time of Emily’s mother’s death to the death of her brother from tuberculosis.
EMILY has all the lush, period details of a prettily mounted costume drama, as it offers a speculative exploration of the author’s inner life with little concern for the actual facts. Some audiences will find that un-mooring from facts thrilling and freeing but viewers should be careful not mistake this for biography.
The film was shot on location in Yorkshire, where the Brontes actually lived, and the splendid photography, and many scenes in the wild, windswept landscape, give the sense of being set within her “Wuthering Heights” itself. EMILY is imaginative fiction but it does sprinkle in some actual facts about the author.
Actress Emma Mackey is tall, dark and gorgeous as Emily Bronte and the perfect choice for the rebellious, misfit, rule-breaker at odds with the Victorian world that writer/director Frances O’Connor had in mind for this drama. Mackey does an impressive job as this rebellious Emily, lighting up the screen in those scenes, but she is less convincing in flashback scenes where the younger Emily is so shy she can hardly speak to strangers and flees her girls boarding school where her extreme shyness makes her the target of bullies.
This Emily is often at odds with her two sisters Charlotte and Anne, although the real Emily was reportedly very close to Charlotte. Emily is also shown as under the thumb of her pastor father, despite her real father’s praise of her as “the very apple of my eye” and teaching her to handle a gun, something he didn’t think her hard-drinking brother was up to.
Of course, if historical accuracy is of no matter to a particular viewer, then this fictional Emily Bronte tale provides steamy romance in a very pretty setting, which including a little bit about the author and her life. This Emily starts out shy but evolves into a bold, rebellious feminist figure, the kind of person who seems more likely to have written “Wuthering Heights.”
EMILY places Emily Bronte in a beautiful, windswept Yorkshire landscape, for a tale that is partly Gothic romance but also a speculative exploration of her artistic and intellectual awakening.
EMILY is visually beautiful, and puts Emily Bronte in the setting for her own novel. Shot on location in Yorkshire, there are many walks across windswept hills, often in the company of her doomed, wild brother Branwell. In this gorgeous, wild landscape, she frees her mind and embraces life without care for social restrictions on women or artists.
Despite its departure from facts or what might be likely in her Victorian world, there is entertainment in EMILY, a well-acted, thrilling fantasy of Emily Bronte with the constrains of her life loosened, with the boldness of her novel “Wuthering Heights” transferred to the author’s life.
EMILY opens Friday, Feb. 24, at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinema and in theaters nationwide.
RATING: 2.5 out of 4 stars
