EMILY

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I’m not sure much could be said to sway potential viewers either way regarding Emily, which is a fairly standard, and competent, period piece about a famous writer from the 19th century—in this case, Emily Brontë. As written and directed by longtime actor Frances O’Connor, in her feature directorial debut, I found myself both engaged, and wondering—maybe she should write and direct a couple of sequels about Emily’s also-famous writer sisters, Charlotte Brontë (who wrote Jane Eyre) and Anne Brontë (who wrote Agnes Grey).

Emily, along with second-born and only son Branwell, was a middle child, a black sheep of the family, and very much depicted as such in Emily. She’s the one who wrote Wuthering Heights, but it is very late into the film before Frances O’Connor gets to that. As portrayed, rather convincingly, by Emma Mackey, we are meant to understand she is an oddball, so “different” that people in town talk about her, although she never struck me as all that strange. I suppose it makes sense that the bar for such things would have been very different in the mid-nineteenth century.

Ultimately, Emily is a love story, on multiple fronts: the love between her and her aspiring-writer brother (Fionn Whitehead); the fictionalized love between her and morally conflicted preacher William Weightman (a dashingly handsome Oliver Jackson-Cohen). On both fronts this movie offers a lot: heartsickness, betrayal. On some levels the same goes for Emily’s relationship with sister Charlotte, who judges her for the “base” content of her novel.

To this movie’s credit, it made me think maybe I should re-read Wuthering Heights. I’ve read it at least once, but not since I was in school, and I really can’t remember any of it at all. Not that I would get any genuine insights from this film going into it, what with its many fictional liberties.

Not that I’m complaining. No one is claiming this is a true story, and Emily stands as solid, if hardly groundbreaking, storytelling on its own merits. There is something a bit uneven about the cinematography by Nanu Segal, offering many striking images of English countryside in various states of weather sprinkled alongside a lot of pointlessly shaky handheld camera shots. I suppose this is meant to evoke Emily’s volatile state of mind.

Emily’s sister criticizes her book by dismissing it as full of selfish characters who only ever think of themselves. I’m not sure if that is also supposed to be a self-assessment by Emily itself, but it seems to come close. I wouldn’t write it off for that reason, though. I wouldn’t write it off at all. I just wouldn’t particularly recommend it to anyone not already into period pieces either.

The performances are solid, the movie is fine, the costumes are nice.

Overall: B