Life of ‘Wuthering Heights’ author boldly re-imagined
A few minutes into “Emily,” an audacious retelling of Emily Bronte’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 Bronte,” the cover says. But Bronte fans 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 writerdirector Frances O’Connor, in a hugely impressive debut feature, re-imagines the life of the “strange” Bronte, who died at age 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 moors where Heathcliff and Catherine lived their own doomed love. O’Connor both tells the story of Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” and places her inside it.
Does it matter that this relationship — with Bronte’s real-life, hunky French tutor and town curate — is fictional, and that he was possibly involved with sister Anne?
Again, purists will balk, but O’Connor has been frank about creating an augmented life for Emily, a story that is “part Emily, part ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and part things from my experiences.”
The film poses a basic question: How did a sheltered young woman, a reverend’s daughter, come up with the emotional bandwidth to create “Wuthering Heights?”
It’s a question asked out loud by older sister Charlotte, who loves but is also violently jealous of her sister. “There’s something you’re hiding from me,” Charlotte says, demanding to know the inspiration of what she calls an “ugly” book. Emily, meanwhile, is deathly ill. She still manages a crafty smile.
We flash back to earlier years. Emily, despite her brooding beauty, is a quiet soul, “the strange one” in Charlotte’s unkind words. Charlotte, the more socially and conventionally successful sister, thrives at school, where she is offered a teaching post. Emily tries to join her and fails spectacularly, suffering homesickness and soon returning home.
Emily’s father assigns her a French tutor:
William Weightman, a new curate who helps the reverend at church. The
handsome young man (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) has at first a prickly connection to Emily, but things change when they study the universal language of love.
Mackey is perfectly cast. The 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.
MPA rating: R (for some sexuality/nudity and drug use)
Running time: 2:10
How to watch: In theaters