Reviews of
Emily are starting to appear in the British press.
Radio Times gives it 3 out of 5 stars.
While there have been many screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights, its author Emily Brontë has somewhat been underserved by cinema. Perhaps it’s because she comes as one of three, with sisters Anne and Charlotte also famed for writing some of the most indelible books in English literature. Or simply that Wuthering Heights is such a landmark novel, it has overpowered its creator, who died aged 30, with just a handful of poems and this one novel to her name.
Actress Frances O’Connor tries to correct that, swinging the spotlight on Emily Brontë in this, her first film as writer-director. Though set in the early 19th century, it’s not a biographical portrait of Emily or the other Brontë sisters, although we do join them in Haworth, Yorkshire, near the moors that so inspired Wuthering Heights’ wild romance between the iconic figures of Cathy and Heathcliff. Rather, it’s a film that mixes reality with myth, as O’Connor tries to join the dots between Emily’s life and her sole novel.
Playing Emily is Emma Mackey, famed for her role as the moody Maeve in Sex Education, and here firing brooding looks at all who cross her path. According to the bespectacled Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Emily is “the strange one” of the family, and O’Connor paints an intriguing picture of sisters who dislike each other. True to history, Anne – played by Amelia Gething – doesn’t get much of a look-in. The rebellious Emily gets on better with Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), their brother. A troublemaker who has a problem with alcohol and opium, he is very much the black sheep of the Brontë family.
Running the Parish church, her father (Adrian Dunbar) is a stern disciplinarian, but Emily is given a shot at love when she meets his new assistant, Mr Weightman (Olivier Jackson-Cohen), who also tutors her in French. After being caught in the rain – apt, as his first sermon talks about this very form of weather – the two share a kiss. But Weightman is weighed down by the thought of committing a mortal sin. Emily, of course, thinks otherwise, buying into what Branwell says: “There is only one true happiness in life – to love and be loved."
The purists will surely balk at this depiction when it was Anne who supposedly had the relationship with the real Weightman. Still, for O’Connor’s purposes, he makes for an able surrogate Heathcliff, with enough bodice ripping to satisfy those looking to get hot under the collar. Coupled with the sweeping shots of the moors, there’s something raw about O’Connor’s approach, albeit it’s not quite as dark as Andrea Arnold’s gloomy 2011 version of Wuthering Heights. [...]
Where the film scores is Emily’s testy relationship with Charlotte, especially in one scene where they converse bitterly in French with each other at the dinner table, in front of their father, blithely unaware of the comments they’re exchanging. Scored with suitably operatic tones by Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski, there’s little room for humour here. Although after the moment Charlotte bursts into tears, a copy of Emily’s book in her hand, Anne wryly comments: “Oh, you finished it then?” A few more lines like that, to break the film’s dark clouds, would not have gone amiss. (James Mottram)
Empire gives it 2 stars out of 5.
There’s nothing wrong with speculative fiction, of course, with works of British directors including Ken Russell and Derek Jarman proving this. But the issue with Emily is that it never does anything interesting with the imagined life it creates for the second-youngest Brontë, choosing merely to recast a rough version of Wuthering Heights with Emily (Emma Mackey) herself in the role of Cathy Earnshaw, and a visiting preacher, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), as her Heathcliff. A bold experiment, perhaps, but it leaves us with a film that does not allow Brontë the respect to create her own fiction.
By failing to commit to any certain source material, O’Connor’s writing never feels wholly coherent as it moves towards Emily’s premature death. Not actually being “based on a true story” is no licence for sloppiness. Mackey does what she can with the stolid material, making Emily a version of her Sex Education character Maeve in period clothing. But this should be Brontë country — Yorkshire, wind, rain, earth and dirt, not clean white sheets and the missionary position. (Lillian Crawford)
That’s Emily as in Brontë, so a great deal of the two hours, ten minutes is spent out on wild and windy moors.
Or in this case, wet and rainy; very wet and rainy. I know it's England; I know it's Yorkshire, but even so, nobody can leave the house in this film without the heavens opening. Usually accompanied by claps of thunder, if you please. This is the most onscreen precipitation since Blade Runner. [...]
Still, the Brontë siblings, that strange coven of creativity and sickly constitutions who dreamed up these timeless gothic romances hidden away from the world in Haworth with their vicar father, ought to provide enough material for a decent film. Or maybe not, because actor turned writer/director O’Connor has decided just to make it all up. Here shy, socially awkward Emily Brontë enjoys the occasional opium pick-me-up and has a passionate affair with local curate Weightman (Jackson-Cohen.)
The film has many commendable aspects. It has a powerful sense of place and period; the score by Abel Korzeniowski is thrilling, and Mackey’s performance as a character called Emily Brontë is outstanding. Though I wonder why the cinematography had to be quite so drab and overcast; surely with all that rain, green should be the dominant colour? Which is the film’s main problem: it’s created a sexed-up fantasy Brontë world that is plodding and dull. [...]
Clearly, Emily Brontë means a lot more to O’Connor than she does to me and if she wants to imagine a bodice-ripping Brontë world that's her right. But isn't the idea that Heathcliff and Cathy were inspired by real events a little reductive? In my Brontë fantasy, Wuthering Heights is a work of pure imagination and an extraordinary leap of perception; in O'Connor's, it's just disguised autobiography. (Michael Joyce)
ShortList features Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who plays William Weightman.
Emily isn't a biopic of Emily Brontë but a fantastical re-telling of her life. Much like the Brontë sister it is based on (a breathtaking performance by Emma Mackey), it has its own unconventional beat that manages to portray the author of Wuthering Heights through the lens of the book, mapping plotlines with her life - all exquisitely shot handheld.
It has it all, like the novel: sex, romance and a good dollop of the gothic, with its portrayal of the moors that make up what's now famously known as Brontë Country and a frankly scary scene with a mask.
"It takes you by surprise, doesn't it?," says Oliver Jackson-Cohen about that particular scene, when we caught up with him London.
He plays the real-life William Weightman in Emily; a man who has devoted his life to god but can't help fall for Emily Brontë (it's thought in real life, it was Anne Brontë he actually fell for). [...]Emily was shot in Yorkshire, on the moors, which was somewhere Jackson-Cohen hadn't visited before. Once he arrived on 'set' though, he was impressed with what he saw.
"To go from base to the parsonage, where we actually shot a lot of the movie, was like a 40-minute drive through the moors," he remembers. "It was in the middle of nowhere. Just to be out in that landscape, with the wind and the rain, is honestly like nothing I have ever experienced.
"It's something Frances [O'Connor, Emily's director] captures really well in the movie, too," he continues. "Being there definitely really helped - I don't think you could get that with green screen."
For Jackson-Cohen and the rest of the cast, their trip to the moors ended up being an extended stay.
Not that you would know it watching the movie, but Emily is a film that was shot in lockdown. Conditions, co-star Oliver Jackson-Cohen thinks, that make it rather special.
"I feel like all of these projects that have been shot during what was a really tricky time will forever hold this quite special thing," says Jackson-Cohen.
For him, lockdown meant staying on location with the cast for six weeks, in the same house much like the Brontë Sisters did back in the 1800s. It made for quite the experience.
"It was incredibly important that we all be together," he says, "because there was this camaraderie and this ease of being together which we all still have to this day."
To get into the character of Weightman, Jackson-Cohen focused on the religious aspect of the character.
"I'm not religious at all but I spoke to some priests, spiritual people and pastors. Even though we only see him do a couple of sermons [in the movie], that was the crux for me - the security that people feel with faith," notes Jackson-Cohen.
Even with this prep, the character didn't click until director Frances O'Connor mentioned a key trait for Weightman.
"We had two weeks of prep and she said to me, 'nothing bad has ever happened to Weightman until he moves here'.
"That was such an incredible jumping off point for the spiral of where he goes and where this relationship with Emily takes him." (Marc Chacksfield)
Oliver Jackson: Yeah. I feel like I definitely have sort of ended going off and just sort of exploring this part. I do feel like with Weightman in "Emily," though, it's the-- so much of it is not-- it's not a selfish-- well, I guess maybe it is a selfish act. But it's governed by his faith, and what he truly believes is right, and society at that time.
And I think that Frances does an incredible job with that, about sort of shining a light on religion and how controlling. It was of society and, specifically, a woman's place within that, and how everyone had to conform because stepping outside of that was too scary.
And so I think that there's something not very brave about him. So-- because he ends up having to conform and terrified of not. (Freda Cooper)
A contributor to
Book Riot shares what she has 'Learned from (Re)reading
Wuthering Heights'.
Wuthering Heights has taught me a lot about empathy. When the majority, if not all, of a book’s characters are unlikeable, it becomes easier to get past the natural urge of needing to blame somebody for bad things happening and instead focus on understanding why they make the choices they make. Every time I reread it, I find myself infuriated with all of them at one point or another. Similarly, I find myself rooting for all of them at different times — except for Earnshaw and Linton Heathcliff. Try as I might, I can never bring myself to root for either of them. I’m only human, okay?
On a related note, I no longer attempt to force a label on a character (or on people, for that matter). Upon my very first read, I squarely placed Heathcliff in the role of victim, and was thrown for a loop when he became the victimizer. I approached my second read thinking he was the great villain of the story. But reading the first part again… Heathcliff is a victim and a victimizer. Catherine is a victim of abuse and a manipulative, egoistic person. People can be multiple things at once, so why shouldn’t we extend fictional characters the same courtesy?
It’s also shaped me as a reader, and consumer of media overall. I learned that, regardless of how much I hate a storyline, it isn’t necessarily bad writing: not all stories have the same trajectory, so it isn’t bad writing if my favorite characters don’t grow, or if the characters I hate aren’t punished. There isn’t only one way to tell a story, and by insisting that there be, I’d be doing storytelling a disservice. Wuthering Heights has shown me how to appreciate a story as it is, instead of how I want it to be. (Carolina Ciucci)
The Tyee (Canada) reviews
Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
In places, Fayne almost feels picaresque in the style of Tom Jones, with generous lashings of the Brontës and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to name only a few antecedents. There are also echoes of epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. MacDonald says some of her early influences weren’t just literary, like Jane Eyre or C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, but also Looney Tunes. (Dorothy Woodend)
Narc Magazine interviews The Unthanks, who have a new album,
Sorrows Away. When we were setting Emily Bronte’s poems to music, that had a very specific outcome. And that’s why we call them our Diversion albums, we love doing them, where we’re given a brief, almost, and have a very clear sense of what that is. Whereas a studio album comes much more from us and we think about where we are in our lives and what we’ve been inspired by.” (Lee Fisher)
This lecture and recital was an ingenious look at examples of operas based on stories taken from different types of literature.
Joanna Harries presented examples from nine operas, singing arias from some and playing recordings from others.
Her solos were expertly accompanied by pianist Lu Liu, who contributed to the relaxed yet instructive morning.
Harries’s theme was “How is it possible to write an opera based on a written text and what would the characters sound like? How can the choice of voice type convey a character? And how can an opera convey the narrative?’
She linked her examples to the development of her passion for literature through childhood fairy tales and Lewis Carroll, her adolescent discovery of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters and then to the sophisticated love of the plays of Shakespeare, Wilde and Chekhov. There was much to learn. (Susan Edwards)
The Yorkshire Post reports that 'Whitby and Ripon have been named in the top 10 spookiest literary locations'.
Ripon - Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë resided at Norton Conyers near Ripon in 1939 [sic] and was inspired to write Jane Eyre after hearing the woeful tale of a woman who was confined to an attic during the 1700s.
This mediaeval manor house and garden are open to the public on set dates throughout the year. (Liana Jacob)
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