Late in her own relatively short life, the writer Charlotte Brontë published a brief "biographical notice" about her two sisters, Emily and Anne, both fellow writers who died tragically young. Of Emily, who died in 1848 at the age of 30 after publishing her sole novel "Wuthering Heights," Charlotte wrote, "In Emily's nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life ... ."
That power and fire is on display in writer/director Frances O'Connor's beautifully rendered drama "Emily," a film about the gifted, strange Brontë sister that mingles fact with imagination to depict Emily's adult years. The Brontë family's life was both quiet and wildly cinematic: Living in an isolated parsonage on the rugged Yorkshire moors, the three sisters and one brother occupied a world of imagination. O'Connor, an actor with some familiarity with period films (she starred in a fine Jane Austen adaptation, "Mansfield Park," back in 1999), seizes that drama in the opening moments of "Emily": As a dying, feverish Emily (Emma Mackey) collapses onto a couch, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) gazes at her intently, determined to ask a question before it's too late. Her gaze catching the pile of new printed copies of "Wuthering Heights," she demands of her pale sister, "How did you write it?"
It's a question that has captivated countless readers over nearly two centuries: How did the shy, awkward daughter of a parson, who never married and rarely left her rural home, write a book of such wild, passionate genius? O'Connor — who writes clearly in a director's statement that, "This is not a biographical film of Emily Brontë" — gives us something of an answer: making her version of Emily a rebel who dives into a forbidden love affair, who lies in the tall grasses telling stories to herself, who opens her window late at night so as to hear the rustling of birds' wings and to feel the dark air around her.
And in Mackey, she has an actor who seems to create her own light. You see in her depiction the woman described in Charlotte's words; this Emily is indeed unworldly, uncomfortable around strangers, struggling to comply with what society expects of her. And yet the artist bubbles up inside her, emerging at moments both inconvenient (there's a harrowing sequence at a party in which Emily dons a mask and takes on a ghostly persona) and poetic. Late in the film, O'Connor lets us hear the quiet scratchings of a pen, accompanied by Abel Korzeniowski's beautiful score, while showing us images of the untamed landscape, the empty schoolroom, the bedroom of one now lost, the laundry blowing on the line. It's a lovely, wordless answer to Charlotte's question.
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'EMILY'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Rated: R (for some sexuality/nudity and drug use)
Running time: 2:10
How to watch: Now in theaters
