Recluse, genius, rebel, muse — a multitude of Emily Brontës crowd the cultural imagination. She was kind, cruel, reserved and wild. Her eyes were gray, though sometimes blue, if perhaps gray-blue or hazel. Her sister Charlotte wrote that Emily, who knew French and German, played Beethoven on the piano, studied in Brussels and, well, wrote “Wuthering Heights,” was a “homebred country girl” with “no worldly wisdom.” Yet Charlotte also wrote that Emily had “a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero.”
That there is no consensus Emily Brontë — who left behind one novel, some 200 poems, several essays and much mystery when she died at 30 in 1848 — has proved liberating for the writer-director Frances O’Connor. Her “Emily” is a confident directorial debut and an enjoyably irreverent take on Brontë, one that builds on the scant historical record to construct an imaginary, at times wishful portrait of the artist. Despite its attention to the past, the movie isn’t an exercise in futile authenticity or a dreary compendium of biopic banalities. It is instead an expression of O’Connor’s love for — and desire to understand — her elusive subject.
In detail and sweep, “Emily” nevertheless shares many of the handsome, cozily inviting essentials of a standard biographical work-up. It was shot in Yorkshire, the northern English county where Brontë lived most of her life, and features the frocks, pretty bonnets, candlelit rooms and horse-drawn carriages of the era. There’s a somber stone home where Emily — a mercurial, mesmerizing Emma Mackey — and her tightknit family work and dream. And naturally there are the moors that, with their peaks, valleys and undulating grasses changing colors with the moody sky, make a suitably dramatic backdrop for transcendental reveries.
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After a brief preface, the story proper opens with Emily on the moors, lying on the ground and idly stroking the grass as she talks to herself. She’s narrating a romantic dialogue between a “Captain Sneaky” and an unnamed woman — an apparent reference to the elaborate adventure tales that the Brontë children invented — the faint sounds of military music and soldiers blending in with birdsong and the lightly stirring wind. It’s a smart, seductive introduction that nicely sets the tone and mood, establishing Emily’s creativity and her contented solitude. She’s clearly at home in nature and with herself, but she’s also presently on the move, racing across the moors and into O’Connor’s adventure.
