#MovieReview: Emily is a biopic bursting with potential [Watch]
Emily is a good watch anchored by Mackey's fantastic lead performance, but it occasionally meanders over 131 minutes before a rushed denouement undercuts its careful pacing.
Emily is a biopic partially re-imagined, drawing as much on the imagination of Emily Brontë as her life itself.
A long-brewing passion project for actress turned director, Frances O’Connor, Emily grasps at something greater but never fully lives up to its promise.
But re-contextualising one of history’s most enduring and enigmatic authors is never futile, and the youth-friendly casting of Emma Mackey (of Sex Education fame) will surely help to get eyes on it.
And Mackey certainly proves her worth beyond the cynicism of marketing, holding the screen with the same aloof, casual depiction of genius as Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game.
She plays Brontë as a woman on the precipice of history, held back only by the fear of her own potential until it grows too large to contain.
Her version of the Wuthering Heights author is timidly precocious, seeking to both dull and invigorate her live-wire brain with opium and sex, the latter with her local priest (Fleabag fans rejoice!).
She chases disorder, but never fully relinquishes control in the way that her beloved brother Branwell does.
Perhaps if she can test the limits of her narrow surroundings then she will discover why she feels so unconstrained by them.
By following the family’s black sheep, she can calibrate her own personality in response after older sister Anne’s sensible example proves unexciting.
Like the film, its protagonist is constantly searching for something more, a deeper connection with her world than religion can provide.
It buffets her into an uncertain future and provides the undercurrent for one of the most forward-thinking novels that emerged out of the Victorian era.
O’Connor’s telling certainly includes half-truths and mental leaps, but her reverence for Brontë is clear.
And biopics will never please everyone, because fealty to truth often proves boring and narrative abstractions are necessary evils.
Emily is a good watch anchored by Mackey’s fantastic lead performance, but it occasionally meanders over 131 minutes before a rushed denouement undercuts its careful pacing.
If it gets more people to seek out canonical literature however, then all the better for it.
Rated 18 for some Nudity and Drug Use. 3.5/5.
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