Emily confirms that the influence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe also extends to biographical dramas. Written and directed by Frances O’Connor, perhaps best known as an actor in films such as Mansfield Park and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, this film follows the final years of Emily Brontë, including her inspiration behind her novel Wuthering Heights. O’Connor diminishes Emily’s genius and self-determination with a kind of literary origin story, suggesting that her contribution toward literature is due to a romantic misunderstanding she had with a sexy priest. It is Fleabag minus the self-awareness or humor, two qualities whose absence make the film as dreary as Emily’s frequent trudges through the mud.
In this telling, Emily (Emma Mackey) is the outcast in her family. Her sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and particularly Anne (Amelia Gething) call her “the weird one,” an unflattering way to describe Emily taking pride in her independent thinking. The inherent sexism of the complaint is not lost on Emily, either, since her brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) has more freedom to explore his ideas. There is relative harmony among this literary family, although the introduction of the vicar William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) sends Emily into a kind of tailspin. Their story begins with a tinge of Austen-esque comedy: they cannot stand each other because they’re so alike, and when they finally stop being so obstinate, they immediately fall in love.
O’Connor handles this material with goth-adjacent solemnity, as if the film must reflect Emily’s novel. Sometimes, the conceit can be admittedly atmospheric, like a memorable scene where Emily turns a parlor game into a kind of ghost story that frightens all the other participants. But the cumulative effect is ultimately dreary, since it becomes all too clear O’Connor builds all the relationship around conjecture over what inspired Emily’s writing. It is too tempting and facile to suggest there is a causal relationship between experience and art. Writers are creative, too, not merely autobiographers who spice up their story with the trappings of fiction. Unfortunately, the Occam’s razor version of events – that Emily pulled from several sources, but mostly her imagination – is nowhere as cinematic as this revisionist telling.
Literary revisionism is hardly a new subgenre, which is part of why this material can be so underwhelming. Consider Emily in contrast to Dickinson, the Apple TV+ series that’s another Emily literary origin story, except the actors and showrunners introduce comedy and anachronistic elements to make the Great American Poet more human, more modern. The heightened artifice has a roundabout way of making Dickinson more authentic, whereas Emily hides those details as if they are a source of shame.
Emily’s haircut in the film is a perfect example: it looks slightly more modern than her sisters, as if it’s a metaphor for how she is out of place in 1840s England. Mackey’s performance also adds to the effect. She portrays Emily as a Daria type, the kind who sees through the bullshit milieu in which she finds herself, and responds with resigned indignation. Angsty and mannered, it does not connect because O’Connor persists that her reverse-engineered film is anything but.
The act of writing is not cinematic, nor is the search for inspiration. Most attempts otherwise invariably look corny, such as The Great Gatsby where the lines from Fitzgerald’s novel flash over the screen. Emily carries on in that fundamental misunderstanding, with added cliche that behind every great female writer must be a man who guides her. Jackson-Cohen is a good romantic foil, since he is so handsome and severe-looking, and his shared Austen-esque chemistry gives way to Shakespearean-esque tragedy, particularly in how his character and Emily just miss fulfilling each other’s destiny. That is undeniably romantic, but it’s wrong for the material because romantic intrigue, at least in this context, is not a hypothetical worth exploring. To the contrary, Emily robs its subject of her agency.
Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street
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