STARRING EMMA MACKEY, FIONN WHITEHEAD, OLIVER JACKSON-COHEN, ADRIAN DUNBAR, ALEXANDRA DOWLING, AMELIA GETHING AND GEMMA JONES.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
‘Freedom of thought…’
This period drama-slash-biopic looks incredible on the big screen, which is where I saw it recently. It tells the story of Emily Bronte’s life before she wrote the book for which she is famous, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, the same tale of Cathy and Heathcliff’s doomed love which inspired Kate Bush’s magical, evocative and chart-topping song.
You don’t have to be a fan of the book to watch this film, I suppose, but it probably helps. I myself love the book, the song, the writer, the singer and the wild windy moors that inspired the whole shebang, so I was literally in writer-heaven for the two hours and ten minutes. Yep. It’s a long ‘un…! Brace yourselves…
Emily Jane Bronte (1818-1848) was an English novelist and poet. The film EMILY, written and directed by a female actor-director (it’s totally a woman’s film, though that doesn’t mean that men can’t enjoy it too!), concentrates on the period of Emily’s life when her Irish father Patrick Bronte, not a barrel of laughs by this account, at least, was serving as perpetual curate to the parish of Haworth in Yorkshire.
Emily, already a stunningly beautiful young woman when we meet her, spends her days writing poetry, making up stories for the amusement of her two sisters, Charlotte and Anne, and running wild on the moors in all weathers with her troubled alcoholic brother, Branwell, who is a painter on his good days.
Their mother is dead at this point, probably from bearing her husband six children, of whom only four are alive when we come in, in an era when women traditionally had a desperate time during childbirth and it weakened them forever after.
The sisters and Branwell miss their kind, gentle mother dreadfully. I’m not surprised. While their priest father isn’t overtly cruel or abusive, he’s still stiff and unbending and pious and there’s a lot of church and praying and being good and all that stuff that frequently doesn’t sit too well with young people.
Emily is thoroughly wild and undisciplined, unlike Charlotte and Anne who are much more genteel and lady-like, and I’m genuinely surprised her humourless father doesn’t try to marry her off to someone in order to curb her excesses.
I say try, because the spirited Emily, dubbed ‘the strange one’ of her family by the villagers, would surely have resisted to the death the notion of marrying for anything other than love…!
Emily and Branwell have such a close, intense relationship that I half-expected them to just slip into an incestuous kiss or two on the moors, or even the full monty. That’s not the way it goes, however, and Emily chooses for a love object her father’s new curate, Mr. William Weightman, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR on Netflix.
Their affair is as wild and exciting as Cathy and Heathcliff’s as first. They make tumultuous love in an abandoned, ramshackle cottage on the moors and Emily, her long dark hair hanging loose and free as an excellent metaphor for her unfettered thinking and behaviour, is happier than she’s presumably ever been in her life.
Then something abominably unfair and wretched happens, and it’s after that that Emily settles down to write the book that makes her name. Did she have to endure the horrible cruelty of a doomed relationship herself before she could adequately write about one? Maybe. Everything happens for a reason, so they say, and maybe so did this.
The film gives the impression that Charlotte was jealous of Emily’s success in writing and publishing WUTHERING HEIGHTS, the gothic novel to end all gothic novels, and we see her getting stuck in to her own writing after Emily’s premature death from tuberculosis. Charlotte, as we know, penned JANE EYRE, another iconic book, and so, if she only knew it, she didn’t really have any reason to be jealous of Emily.
We clearly see both Emily and Charlotte being inspired to write by the moors outside their very bedroom windows. The moors are indeed a place where you could ‘roll and fall in green.’
Wild and desolate, they extend to the Brontes’ garden and takes in the church where their father is parish priest and the fabulous old graveyard. It would be so easy to be inspired to write by such a dream-like place. The scenes where it’s raining on the moors (that’s all of them, lol) are out-of-this-world gorgeous.
Unfortunately, the downside of living in such a place and time is the long list of diseases that can carry off a body in a twinkling, due to unsanitary conditions and lack of all the medicines that sadly haven’t been invented yet.
Cholera, tuberculosis, the consumption, for example, all those delightful ailments characterised by high fever and genteelly coughing up blood into a hanky before you expire, all skin and bone and huge tormented eyes, and have to be laid to rest pretty sharpish-like before you infect anyone else with your gross disease, eeuw!
Emma Mackey, who plays Emily, is a terrific actress and captures her subject’s conflicted essence really well. Gemma Jones- BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY and a million other things- portrays the Bronte sisters’ aunt, though I’m not sure which side of the family she represents. She’s seventy-nine, now, would you believe, and looks adorable in her sweet little bonnet and ribbony old lady things.
The film is actually a good choice for Halloween. There’s a sort of séance in it which puts the willies up all the sisters (though not in the way they’d like, I fancy, snigger), and WUTHERING HEIGHTS, while not classified as a ghost story as such, has more than enough that’s haunting in it to justify either reading or watching it in the season of the witch, when the veil between our world and the spirit world is at its thinnest. Enjoy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
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