‘Emily’ Taps Into Some of That Patented Brontë Passion

Emily, not the Criminal (CREDIT: Bleecker Street)

Starring: Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver-Jackson Cohen, Alexandra Dowling, Amelia Githing, Adrian Dunbar, Gemma Jones

Director: Frances O’Connor

Running Time: 130 Minutes

Rating: R for Opium and Heaving Bosoms

Release Date: February 17, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey) has a terrible case of Middle Child Syndrome! Her older sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) calls her “the Strange One,” while their younger sister Anne (Amelia Gething) seems to skate by without anyone giving her guff for anything. Why can’t they just leave her be? They’ve all got the literary bug, after all! At least Emily can lean on her similarly misunderstood brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) for support. And then there are her explosive French lessons with her tutor William Weightman (Oliver-Jackson Cohen), which eventually erupt into something stunningly passionate. Meanwhile, Brontë patriarch Patrick (Adrian Dunbar) just doesn’t seem to understand any of his children.

What Made an Impression?: Despite being an English major, I don’t have much experience with the work of the Brontë sisters, and Emily forced me to take stock of what I do know about them. I’m aware that Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, and I’ve seen the 2011 adaptation of that one starring Mia Wasikowska and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Meanwhile, when I hear the name “Anne Brontë,” the first thing I think of is the time that Jeopardy! champ Roger Craig quadrupled his score in the span of two clues. And of course I’ve heard that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, but the only one of its many adaptations that I’ve ever seen is the semaphore version from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

This is all to say that I came into Emily as a bit of a blank slate! Or at least something close to it. I was completely unfamiliar with Ms. Middle Brontë’s “Strange One” reputation, and let me tell you: I thought it was a bunch of baloney! And I think that was the reaction that writer-director Frances O’Connor was going for. So mission accomplished there on revising the historical record.

Other than that, Emily struck me as a fairly typical example of both a pastoral English period piece and a literary biography. Which is to say: filled with internal distress and verdant passion that can’t quite match the fictional output of its subject. But then we get into the love affair, and oh my, is it a lot more explicit than I was expecting! Let’s just say, that R rating is earned. I won’t ever underestimate you again, cast and crew of Emily.

Emily is Recommended If You Like: Bodice-ripping

Grade: 3 out of 5 Cliffs

This Is a Movie Review: Only Christopher Nolan Could Make a War Movie as Intricately Crafted as ‘Dunkirk’

This review was originally posted on News Cult in July 2017.

Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, James D’Arcy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, Barry Keoghan

Director: Christopher Nolan

Running Time: 106 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for All the Moments That Make You Duck and Cover

Release Date: July 21, 2017

Christopher Nolan has established his reputation as filmmaker by tweaking the genre formulas of noir, superheroes, and mindbenders, inventing new dialects within pre-existing cinematic language. A war movie would not seem like the most obvious next logical step for him, as it would not seem to invite such inventiveness. But Nolan does indeed apply his puzzle-box approach to Dunkirk, and the end result makes perfect sense. The rescue of hundreds of soldiers after a massive military defeat is an attempt to impose order on a fundamentally chaotic situation, and accordingly, what Dunkirk accomplishes is a union of control and constant unease.

Nolan’s method of choice for dramatizing the 1940 World War II evacuation from the titular French beaches is ingenious, but it could have just as easily been a folly in less steady hands. There are three intercut portions: taking place over a week, the boys on the shore waiting to be rescued; taking place over a day, a mariner navigating his fishing vessel across the English Channel to provide support; and taking place over an hour, Air Force pilots clearing the skies to make the rescue easier. The order of events is accordingly difficult to keep track of, and ultimately beside the point. Dunkirk is about the overwhelming experience, as it asks the audience to simultaneously intuit both sustained and short-burst tension.

While the acting is uniformly solid, no single character makes much of an impression, unless you count the music as a character. The dialogue is perpetually difficult to parse: the accents are thicker than your average Brit, the constant dusk and frequent profile shots make it hard to lip read, Tom Hardy wears a mask. But it is Hans Zimmer’s relentlessly thrumming score that gets most in the way. A constant tick-tick-tick is the new BWAHHH. According to Christopher Nolan’s analysis of war, the fight to defend ideals is often cacophonous and rarely allows for relief.

Dunkirk is Recommended If You Like: Saving Private Ryan crossed with Inception, Their Finest

Grade: 4 out of 5 Open-Faced PB&J Sandwiches