in the US and many sites not only review the film but also look into what's real and what's not, so we have plenty of reading material today. After having reviewed it yesterday,
goes on to question whether the 'liberties' taken in the film are 'so bad'.
“I wrote this the way Emily wrote ‘Wuthering Heights,’” O’Connor explains of the film, which is impressionistic and moody. “She did the research, she let her imagination go to these deep, dark places and then this work came out. I let my research be in different avenues and then I used those elements to craft a story that is about who she is — somebody who had a very authentic voice but didn’t really fit in. A lot of women feel like that or have felt like that.”
The film, opening in Los Angeles on Friday, stars Emma Mackey as Emily, and draws on both historical fact and creative imagining. While writing the script, O’Connor read every book she could find. Her most essential sources were “The Brontë Myth” by Lucasta Miller and “The Brontës” by Juliet Barker; the Brontë Parsonage Museum also offered research and insight.
Although some scholars have voiced frustration that “Emily” isn’t completely accurate, the fictionalized aspects were primarily used to fill in existing blanks.
“There were very few records of [Emily’s] life,” explains Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, adding that the author didn’t really form friendships outside the family. “So while we’ve got a wealth of material connected with Charlotte — we’ve got literally hundreds of letters that she wrote to friends and then other writers when she became a celebrity author — we just don’t have that material in the case of Emily. So a lot of it is down to your own interpretation of the scanty evidence that survives. It’s always really interesting to see other people’s ideas about Emily.”
One of the great debates about Emily Brontë is whether she ever had a romantic relationship. Some scholars believe that the author couldn’t have written “Wuthering Heights” without experiencing real-life love. Others, such as Dinsdale, take the opposite view: It’s because she never had a relationship that the book is so singular.
In the film, O’Connor gives Emily a passionate affair with William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a young curate in the local parish. Although historians concur that Anne Brontë — and possibly Charlotte — fancied Weightman, there is no evidence that Emily did. In the context of “Emily,” however, Weightman is key to understanding her.
“For me, in the film the church represents the patriarchy and Emily’s wild nature represents the female, the creative, the dark and the moon,” O’Connor explains. “So you’ve got these two opposing forces in the film. If you take a character like Weightman, he is connected to the patriarchy. He eventually has to go back into that position of structure and masculinity and say [to Emily], ‘There is something ungodly about you.’ I was interested in having that discussion.” [...]
“In the same way that ‘Wuthering Heights’ needs to be experienced as a book without you placing your analytical mind on it, I think this film can’t really be pinned down,” Mackey says. “It’s a period drama; it’s also not at all a period drama. It’s not stuck in a time. It feels like it can talk to different kinds of generations of people. I just wanted people to feel surprised by it in the same way that I was when I read it.”
One of the most fascinating discoveries for O’Connor was the existence of a porcelain mask that was given to Patrick and Maria Brontë as a wedding gift. It was handed to the Brontë siblings to hide behind when they were children and needed courage to speak. The whereabouts of the mask are unknown, but it reappears in the film as Emily wears it to channel her late mother.
“It became a great object of Emily’s creativity, but the dark aspect of it,” O’Connor notes. “It’s almost like a talisman.”
At the core of the film is a sense of who Emily Brontë might have been. O’Connor uses both the historical details and the fictional aspects to offer the viewer an impression of Emily as rebellious, untethered and resolutely self-assured — traits she feels are relatable to young viewers.
“I really do feel that Emily has something to say to this current generation,” O’Connor explains. “Here is a story in which young women are in the middle of exploring who they are. For a lot of women, actually, being your authentic self comes at a cost because the patriarchy doesn’t really reward it very much.”
“Her life was probably a lot more boring than the film, but she knew what she wanted,” Mackey adds. “She was quite strong-minded. I think you can kind of get a sense of that in her writing. She just was so free. She doesn’t impose any rules on herself at all. And so that was quite liberating to do in the film.”
O’Connor’s script, along with costumes and props from the film, are on display in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Since the movie’s U.K. release last year, Dinsdale has, in fact, noticed an uptick in interest from visitors in their teens and 20s. For the museum, it’s not about fact versus fiction, but instead about renewed excitement for the subject matter.
“Wherever the Brontës are concerned, passions run high,” Dinsdale says. “People get very attached to the Brontës [and] to the idea of them, and you’re always going to court controversy in any adaptation about their lives. But my view is that anything that generates new interest in ‘Wuthering Heights’ and in English poetry has got to be a good thing. And clearly, the film has done that.” (Emily Zemler)
O’Connor, who wrote and directed the film, read Wuthering Heights when she was 15 and instantly fell in love with it. Drawn to the rebellious nature of the characters, she appreciated that Emily herself was “a quiet rebel in a lot of ways.” While acknowledging that the movie’s blend of fact and fiction may seem “deliberately provocative” (the relationship with Weightman is particularly ahistorical), O’Connor says she hopes her protagonist’s indomitable spirit resonates with viewers.
“I’m letting her have moments that are very truthfully biographical and moments that are kind of heightened and from my imagination, from my research,” O’Connor adds. “I love that, and I think Emily would love that, because it’s an active creative process, and that’s something she really believed in. You can feel that when you read her book. … She creates this gorgeous, Gothic, dark world, where people are violent and angry and in love and have deep emotions, and that’s very alive. And I wanted to have that same feeling in the film for the audience.” (Michelle Mehrtens)
Recluse, genius, rebel, muse — a multitude of Emily Brontës crowd the cultural imagination. She was kind, cruel, reserved and wild. Her eyes were gray, though sometimes blue, if perhaps gray-blue or hazel. Her sister Charlotte wrote that Emily, who knew French and German, played Beethoven on the piano, studied in Brussels and, well, wrote “Wuthering Heights,” was a “homebred country girl” with “no worldly wisdom.” Yet Charlotte also wrote that Emily had “a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero.”
That there is no consensus Emily Brontë — who left behind one novel, some 200 poems, several essays and much mystery when she died at 30 in 1848 — has proved liberating for the writer-director Frances O’Connor. Her “Emily” is a confident directorial debut and an enjoyably irreverent take on Brontë, one that builds on the scant historical record to construct an imaginary, at times wishful portrait of the artist. Despite its attention to the past, the movie isn’t an exercise in futile authenticity or a dreary compendium of biopic banalities. It is instead an expression of O’Connor’s love for — and desire to understand — her elusive subject.
In detail and sweep, “Emily” nevertheless shares many of the handsome, cozily inviting essentials of a standard biographical work-up. It was shot in Yorkshire, the northern English county where Brontë lived most of her life, and features the frocks, pretty bonnets, candlelit rooms and horse-drawn carriages of the era. There’s a somber stone home where Emily — a mercurial, mesmerizing Emma Mackey — and her tightknit family work and dream. And naturally there are the moors that, with their peaks, valleys and undulating grasses changing colors with the moody sky, make a suitably dramatic backdrop for transcendental reveries. [...]
The affair is pleasurably steamy, and however heretical O’Connor’s invention, it’s nice to see Emily Brontë having a bodice-ripping good time, especially given how steeped in sorrow her real life was. Among the movie’s most plaintive sections are those involving her brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), the family’s tragic only son. (Amelia Gething plays Anne, the youngest sibling.) In their passionate intensity and in some narrative particulars — there are outdoor rendezvous and some spying through windows — Emily’s relationships with both Branwell and Weightman suggestively evoke that between Catherine and Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” (It also summons up the glossy 1939 film adaptation.)
Brontë fundamentalists might object; Weightman, for one, was real, the affair apparently not, alas. Yet O’Connor’s liberties work for a story that, above all, is about art as an act of radical sovereignty. Building on a series of oppositions — nature and culture, realism and romance, duty and freedom — O’Connor brings Emily the myth to vibrant life, persuasively suggesting that this ostensibly strange and cloistered genius came into being not despite her contradictions but through them. At once a woman of her time and free of its limitations, her Emily is corseted and unrestrained, respectable and scandalous, one of life’s astonishing escape artists who endures brute reality only to bend it to her own thrilling ends. (Manohla Dargis)
That name on the book cover is our first warning bell.
Only two minutes into “Emily,” a bold and audacious retelling of Emily Brontë’s life starring an uncommonly compelling Emma Mackey, we spy freshly bound volumes of “Wuthering Heights,” her only novel and life’s achievement.
“By Emily Brontë,” the cover says. But Brontë fans and even some casual readers will know that Emily, like her sisters Charlotte and Anne, published at first under a male pseudonym, in her case Ellis Bell. It was both a bid for privacy and a concession to a Victorian society in which a female author could hardly expect to garner the same respect and deference accorded her male counterparts.
This change is the first — but not the most important — way in which writer-director Frances O’Connor, in a hugely impressive debut feature, reimagines the life of the “strange” Brontë, who died at 30, unable to give the world more novels and poems. Most brazenly, O’Connor gives Emily a love affair — fiery, forbidden and ultimately tragic — with turbulent passion unfolding on the windswept Yorkshire moors.
Remind you of anything? These are the same “wily, windy moors,” to quote singer Kate Bush, where Heathcliff and Catherine lived their own doomed love. O’Connor both tells the story of Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” and places her inside it. [...]
Mackey is perfectly cast. When her hair is down, as when she runs in the rain on the moors, or rolls down hills with her beloved Branwell (an excellent Fionn Whitehead as the loving brother who ultimately sinks into opium addiction), we could be in 2023, so contemporary is her look. But put her hair in a bonnet and listen to her speak, and we’re transported to the 19th century in a flash. The young actor’s versatility over more than two hours, as she experiences passion, lust, anger, heartbreak, grief, ambition and more, is something to behold.
In O’Connor’s telling, it is clearly this lived experience that forms the basis for the book Emily finally sits down to write. Which raises another question: Is O’Connor arguing that one can only write what one has lived — that a famously fertile imagination is not enough?
O’Connor’s own explanation is broader, though. She has called “Emily" her love letter to young women of today, who, she hopes, will respond to its celebration of one's authentic voice and potential. And that they'll allow themselves to be, essentially, imperfect.
Or, we could say, “strange.” Emily asks Branwell if he thinks she is strange at one point, and he responds: “Everyone’s strange if you look at them for long enough.”
Luckily we get to look long and and hard at this Emily, brought provocatively to life by O’Connor and her star. Strange or not, it’s hard to look away. (Jocelyn Noveck)
Where do stories come from? This question is central to the new movie “Emily” and its take on how Emily Brontë came to write her one novel, the wild and weird “Wuthering Heights.” [...]
As Brontë, Ms. Mackey displays an intensity, intelligence, and acute sensitivity in keeping with our notion of how the writer might have lived. She also has an amazing face — a cross between Eva Green, Margot Robbie, and Kiera Knightley — with its wide features and silken composition outlined in raven hair that is rarely hidden under a bonnet like that of the other female characters. Alexandra Dowling as Charlotte Brontë, who goes on to write “Jane Eyre,” rivets with her composure and confidence, leaving this viewer wishing that there were more scenes addressing their sibling rivalry and exchange of ideas.
Both Fionn Whitehead as Emily’s brother and Oliver Jackson-Cohen as her conflicted lover effectively convey their admiration of and influence over Brontë, but even together they make for a weak-tea version of what the filmmakers intend to be the composite character of the novel’s Heathcliff. Nothing in their characters’ personalities indicate a tempestuous nature or vengeful proclivity akin to the iconic character. [...]
What we are left with is a story about the makings of an iconic book where the details don’t add up to more than your run-of-the-mill melodrama. As in many a melodrama, music must do much of the heavy lifting, and Abel Korzeniowski’s string section careens up and down while his piano occasionally flits romantically or plods despondently.
Ms. O’Conner best employs his hypnotic strings during setpieces in which scenes play out without audible words, despite the actors sometimes mouthing dialogue. Appropriately, these sequences come closest to mirroring the heavy mood of Gothic novels and the rise-and-fall rhythm of Brontë’s writing. They also subtly suggest a rich source for some stories: lovely music. (Carlos Sousa)
One bad idea presides over Emily, sapping its better moments of their originality. That idea is one that often comes up in films about writers: the notion that no one could possibly write well about something they hadn’t experienced directly. The 2007 movie Becoming Jane assured its viewers that Jane Austen was only able to produce so many great novels about young women finding true love because she had attained and (unlike her heroines) lost it herself. According to Emily, Brontë (Emma Mackey) had a passionate affair with William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the curate who worked with her father (Adrian Dunbar). That explains how she was able to write Wuthering Heights.
A big problem with this premise is that Wuthering Heights depicts exactly the sort of love affair that a person who’d never been in a romantic relationship is likely to invent, all wildness and extremity and drama. The brilliance of the novel lies in that wildness, in its author’s complete commitment to the ruthlessness of her characters’ emotions and the uncanny afterglow left in their wake—not in its realism. Wuthering Heights works because it is a fantasy untrammeled by the sort of practical considerations that dominated the actual lives of Emily Brontë and her family. Besides, romantic love is arguably the predominate theme of Western literature and culture, especially the parts of it with which the Brontës were familiar. It’s not as if they (or anyone else) needed first-hand experience to know anything about extravagant passion, given how much, and how widely, they read.
The characters in Emily don’t do much reading, and none at all if you eliminate the times they pore over little scraps of paper scribbled on by one of the other characters. There’s hardly a book in the movie before the scene at the end in which Emily unwraps a parcel of fresh copies of Wuthering Heights and smiles with keen satisfaction at the sight of her name printed on the title page. This itself is apocryphal, since the novel was originally published under the pen name Ellis Bell, and even Emily’s own father (depicted in yet another absurd scene toasting Emily at a sort of book party) did not know she had written it until after her death in 1848.
Instead of books there is “writing,” something the characters in Emily speak of with a breathless, aspirational reverence, as if educated 19th-century British people weren’t constantly writing in one form or another: letters, diaries, poetry, sermons, essays, reviews, and so on. It was one of the few forms of entertainment and the only means of communication besides speaking face-to-face. [...]
For the Emily Brontë of Emily, however, “writing” is less something you do or consume than it is a kind of longed-for identity, or personal brand, which tracks with other ways in which the film depicts her as an early incarnation of Gen-Z sensibility. Instead of the exhilarated, attentive nature lover who appears in contemporary accounts of Emily—the kind of person who includes the age of the family canary in her time-capsule diaries—this Emily’s affinity with the moors is more aesthetic. She’s a cottagecore Brontë whose main activity is wandering through meadows in long skirts, trailing her slender fingers through willow leaves for a sunstruck lens. The historical Emily was notoriously shy, which for Mackey means lurking in the background of group scenes, glaring like a sulking, dimwitted child. She complains that the neighbors regard her as an “odd fish” and proposes remaining in her room for the entire time that one of Charlotte’s friends comes to visit. Later, having taken a job teaching at the same school that employs her sister, she becomes so overwhelmed that Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) finds her weeping in a closet. It’s all too easy to picture this Emily with a TikTok account dedicated to discussing the trials of being an introvert, as well elaborating on her vague self-diagnosed “mental illness” and “trauma response.”
This is not the Emily Brontë who, as Charlotte recalled, once marched into the parsonage after having been bitten by a rabid dog and cauterized the wound herself with a hot poker. Nor is it the girl whose father trained her to use a rifle in the event the family was attacked by Chartists, and whose sharp-shooting caused him to exclaim, “Oh, she is a brave and noble girl! She is my right-hand, nay the very apple of my eye!” Instead of the often distracted and neglectful Patrick Brontë of history, the father in Emily is a stern disciplinarian (and made more intimidating for anyone familiar with Dunbar’s thunderous performance as the nemesis of bent coppers in the TV series Line of Duty). The film’s Emily is a sullen rebel without much cause, too easily brought under the sway of her wastrel brother (Fionn Whitehead), who has “freedom of thought” tattooed on his forearm.
In real life, Emily was nearly inseparable from her sister, Anne (Amelia Gething), and it was Charlotte who was closer to Branwell, at least in childhood. Also, if the real-life Weightman showed any preference for one of the sisters, it was Anne, generally considered the prettiest of the three. Charlotte gets an even less thoughtful treatment, depicted in Emily as an envious, prim, unimaginative older sister who only has the idea of writing a novel herself after Emily’s masterpiece reduces her to tears and cries of “I hate you!” In reality, Jane Eyre was published before Wuthering Heights and was such a smash hit that after Emily’s and Anne’s deaths, Charlotte had to confront a publisher who tried to pass her sisters’ novels off as her own. Lip service—and only that—is paid to the fact that Emily would never have been published at all if Charlotte had not convinced her that it was worth the sacrifice of some of her privacy.
This harsh view of Charlotte is par for the course of late, and she was certainly not blameless. Nevertheless, she was navigating a major cultural pivot. The Brontës grew up marinating in the texts of peak Romanticism, but by the time Charlotte suddenly found herself a celebrated literary figure, moral fashion had shifted. (No one likes to admit that morality is subject to fashion, but it is.) The bold individualism that the Romantics championed became tarnished in the eyes of the Victorians, not least because of the destructive behavior of the people, like Byron, who espoused it. To this day, many readers object to the selfish cruelty of the characters in Wuthering Heights, and to the idea that the grandeur of Brontë’s vision compensates for it. When Charlotte tried to tweak Emily’s and Anne’s reputations after their deaths—the really unforgivable move was suppressing the publication of Anne’s second novel because it dealt with alcoholism and domestic violence—she was defending her sisters from accusations of coarseness and immorality that felt as valid to her as the ideas we have of propriety today, even if we don’t now agree with them.
The Emily of Emily doesn’t do much thinking, unless it’s about sex.
As for “freedom of thought,” the Emily of Emily doesn’t do much thinking, unless it’s about sex. In one particularly ridiculous moment, Weightman furtively glances at one of Emily’s poems, accompanied by a breathy voiceover by Mackey, until the phrase “thy sweet tongue” strikes him as too overwhelmingly racy and he stuffs the paper in his pocket. The film implies that Bronte’s verse was mostly heady love poems, but the poem in question, “Speak, God of Visions,” is addressed not to a lover but to the Romantic personification of the imagination. Like so much of her verse, it has a mystical, intellectual, solitary bent completely absent from Emily, in which freedom consists mainly of snogging a curate in an abandoned cottage and dancing drunkenly in your brother’s railway station office. The Emily Brontë who wrote “No Coward Soul Is Mine” deserves better than to be reduced to conventional unconventionality and to the preoccupations of our moment. Above all she deserves more than this biopic’s utter lack of interest in the very thing that made her immortal. Emily is a movie about “writing” that’s forgotten how to read. (Laura Miller)
O'Connor infuses the film with hints of Wuthering Heights, exploring how moments large and small would have contributed to its story; and yet, these are never exagerrated nor sign-posted - which might be detrimental for any who have not read the novel, but for those familiar, we see these are we see the moments in our own life that we don't recognize will be significant. Again, always centering Emily in the story - the strange girl, who has little patience for societal expectations, who wears her heart on her sleeve and exposes her soul to the wilds around her.
Mackey absolutely throws herself into the part, never wavering even as Emily must battle between her obligations, her sibling bond with Branwell, at once helped by their joint rejection of societal expectations and hindered when each finds love the other disapproves of, and her affair with William. Its passion and the violence it leads to, led Emily to write with passion and violence, and Lackey lets every emotion float across her eyes and face. It's impossible not to be enthralled, especially with cinematographer's Nanu Segal's unsentimental and often brutal view of the landscape and its inhabitants, and a score (produced by Mina Korzeniowski) that matches Emily's often dizzying, feverish heights.
A quietly remarkable directorial debut, Emily will bring many emotions and thoughts to its audience, from terror to passion to horror to anger to entrancing first love. O'Connor eschews the more typical biopic tone and tropes to craft something as unique as the titular character. (Shelagh Rowan-Legg)
What is it about Emily Brontë that motivated you to want to write/direct this film?
When I was 15, I read “Wuthering Heights” on a school bus. I remember getting off and just really feeling like I’d been somewhere — this kind of supernatural atmosphere… This beautiful, gothic landscape and these characters in the middle of that were rebellious, and yet they were so themselves. It just really spoke to my kind of 15-year-old angsty self. Then as I got older, reading her poetry and learning a little bit more about her, I just found her very inspiring as a person. She was an introvert, she was incredibly intelligent, and she wrote this amazing novel at the age of 27.
I really wanted to tell a story that celebrated who she was, and I also think she was edited by a lot of people. I wanted to move her narrative into the center, and explore themes that I was interested in exploring, which is female authenticity and the female voice. [...]
We’ve seen references back to the Brontë’s work with both Charlotte and Emily and even you just said how timeless their work can be. Why do you think that is?
Because of who they probably really were, which were intelligent, free-thinking kind of women. I think we’ve forgotten that and we just canonize them and put them in with all of the other Victorian authors at that time, but they were different. I think that’s why they still speak to us, because the voices in those books are just so original and true.
From reading/research you’ve done, how would you describe Emily and what traits of hers did you want to come across on screen?
From [what I’ve read] there are small little facts together, this kind of breadcrumb trail of a portrait of who Emily really was. I feel like she was someone who was introverted. I think she did have social anxiety. Some people say that she might have even been on the spectrum, but it’s kind of speculative. She was someone who loved nature and she got sick if she left home, she couldn’t handle being away from her family.
There are a lot of little things, like this great story of Charlotte and Emily going shopping for material for dresses in Bradford, and Emily picked this purple lightning bolt pattern. Everyone was horrified that she was going to make a dress out of it, but apparently, she looked amazing in it — I just thought that was great. So we actually had Michael O’Connor, our costume designer, design a lightning bolt dress for Emily in the center of the story. She wears it a lot of the time, like when she’s taking drugs and rolling down the hill — that’s that dress. Little moments like that help emphasize who she was. [...]
Lastly, what do you hope this film brings for Emily Brontë fans and also those who are new to her and her work?
I have a very personal relationship to Emily, and I know anyone who really loves Emily also has a personal relationship with her. So there will be some people who go: That’s different from how I see her. I totally respect that. But I really am coming from this position of celebrating who she was and I just hope that they enjoy the film and understand the intention behind it. Then I guess if somebody picks up a copy of “Wuthering Heights” and they’ve never read it before after seeing the film, I think that would be great. All I really wanted to do is to tell a story about Emily that people actually related to. (Molly Given)
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