Review: becoming Brontë in Emily
If there are two things I know in life, it’s that God made little green apples, and that, either this year or next, there will be another movie based on a novel by Jane Austen or one of the Brontë sisters. Literary geniuses though they may be, these ladies have lorded over the Hollywood landscape from the moment I first drew breath. (Literally — Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, the beautiful masterwork that started this rather stuffy tradition, came out when I was nine months old.)
When it isn’t Keira Knightley professing love through clenched teeth in Pride and Prejudice (2005), then it’s Anne Hathaway pretending to be Austen herself in Becoming Jane (‘07). You can take Mia Wasikowska glumly surveying the moor in Jane Eyre (‘11), or Ana Taylor-Joy coyly biting into a strawberry in Emma (‘20). There’s Kate Beckinsale puppet mastering her in-laws in Love and Friendship (‘16), Dakota Johnson winking through the fourth wall in Persuasion (‘22), and Keri Russell finally throwing in the towel with a free-for-all utopic getaway in Austenland (‘13).
Needless to say, these movies all start to look and feel the same after a while, jumping from the actual novels to stories about the women who wrote them until it’s all one big corseted blur.
It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at this phenomenon until, happily, a film comes along that reminds you why Austen and the Brontës make for such perennially satisfying entertainment. Such is the case with Emily, a new film written and directed by Frances O’Connor in her directorial debut, that tells the life story of the eponymous, middle-child Brontë.
Esteemed and beloved today for penning the Gothic romance Wuthering Heights, when we first meet her in O’Connor’s film, young Emily (played by the great Emma Mackey) is merely an introverted, severe teenager with a propensity to spending hours alone in the hills outside her family’s countryside home, weaving elaborate tales in her head. She is visited by her older sister, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), who is about to become a teacher and chides Emily for remaining tied to the storytelling “games” they played together as children. But Emily remains resolute — especially when the dashing curate Mr. Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) comes to town, whose religious niceties fall on her ears like dust even as they electrify her less discerning sisters.
As the years go by, Emily finds it impossible to shake her particular rhythm of existence. She doesn’t change, but, rather, responds to a growing inner anguish (“You know what the villagers call me? ‘The strange one.’”) with a host of lurid distractions: tattoos, alcohol, opium — even, presently, that dunce of a curate, for whom she trades eye rolls with rolls in the hay. But like anyone who tries pushing down their emotions, Emily Brontë comes to a point so low that she is unable to adequately numb herself. It is from this place — raw, vulnerable, and hurt — that her great novel is born.
Emily is never less than an engrossing portrait of a fascinating creative mind. Credit is due to Ms. O’Connor, of course, but the biggest draw here is the film’s lead actor. Mackey, whom I first saw onscreen a year ago in Death on the Nile, is a true talent. Comprehensive and calm intelligence flashes across her face like sunlight on a moving train. She meets the camera head on, in a manner that is arresting yet eloquent. She can carry a movie, even if she does not yet guide them in the way of Jennifer Lawrence or Kate Winslet. I’m positive that if she continues to find work, in a variety of genres, she will get there. Emma Mackey is someone to watch.
Her work in Emily is backed up by some striking mise en scène — namely, the seance sequence, which is straight out of a horror film. Late at night, early in their acquaintanceship, the Brontës and Mr. Weightman take turns passing an eerie white mask around the parlor table, pretending to be someone else while the others guess at who it is. At first, Emily resists participating, but when she finally does slip on the mask, the whole room goes dead quiet. Her bearing and her voice change. A void of dark stretches behind her. The white, eyeless mask glows in low candlelight.
“My darlings,” she coos to her sisters. The young women sob, in fear and in awe. It’s no performance they’re witnessing: Emily has channeled the spirit of their departed mother.
It’s a wholly uncommon note to strike in a historical drama, but the seance scene in Emily lends all the more edginess to its already rough-edged subject. Perhaps the most compelling thing about this film is its depiction of Ms. Brontë’s sincere affinity for the darker or more perturbing undercurrents of the natural world. Biographers of the notoriously shy writer have long considered her a difficult figure to assess, but as portrayed by Mackey and O’Connor she comes across as a kind of sinister oracle — a person who sees and experiences darkness in her surroundings that others either do not grasp or will not acknowledge.
The really curious thing is that Emily almost takes this darkness for granted. As O’Connor guides us through what is, in fact, a heavily fictionalized interpretation of the writer’s short life, we witness a woman whose unique depths are plumbed first by her own imagination, but then by drugs, heartbreak, and loss. She comes across as a distinctly vivid presence; part of the joy in watching Emily is in recognizing that the traits which often made people from the past so difficult to understand in their own time would be warmly welcomed today.
Yet is this really true? Isn’t it probable that a woman who lived against convention one-hundred-eighty years ago would still be confronted with misogyny in the twenty-first century? Would her mental health be that much better off? Depression is still brutal for us, even with medication, and a lot of folks still turn to opium to ease their suffering.
Indeed, I think “suffering” is the key ingredient here. Brontë is one of those cultural figures, like Van Gogh or Billie Holiday, who continues to hold currency because of the apparent depth of her feelings. We care about her because, ostensibly, she cared. And because she struggled with things like mental health and drug addiction, ailments of the soul that we now tell ourselves we “understand,” there’s room to allow her that smuggest of postmortems: “she was so modern.”
Ours is a culture that romanticizes suffering. Being unwell carries a cachet that ties directly to matters of privilege, economy and class. Looking over the range of movies and TV shows that continue to be set at the height of British colonial power, it can be dispiriting to consider how lustily audiences embrace tried-and-true stories of opulent misery. Emily is like someone clearing their throat at a rarefied dinner party: it’s out of genuine necessity, and it’s also a low-lying desire to be noticed, or, perhaps, to be thought of as disruptive.
