My Name Is Emily movie review (2017)

The best thing about Emily is that she’s played by Evanna Lynch. Lynch, who played the charmingly abstracted Luna Lovegood in some of the Harry Potter pictures, has grown into a young woman who looks like a rougher-edged Saoirse Ronan, and she brings a gritty conviction to the antisocial tendencies that Emily cultivates after her beloved dad, played by Michael Smiley, is carted off to a lunatic asylum. Now with foster parents, she immediately alienates her new schoolteacher with a biographical approach to literary criticism, disclosing to her classmates that all that talk in Wordsworth about “splendor in the grass” is about sublimated sexual transgression and guilt. This and more put stars in the eyes of her handsome, upper-crust classmate Arden (George Webster). Emily couldn’t be less interested. But then she does not receive her customary birthday card from dad, and Emily is forced to solicit her only potential friend on a mission to drive to the institution and confront the old man, and maybe even break him out of the joint. She calls on Arden at home just as he’s getting a snootful from his awful dad, and before Arden can even say to dad “Next time you hit me, you better knock me out,” you’re thinking “Road Trip!”

And off they go, abetted by a kindly grandma and her vintage auto (and its attendant eight-track player, and John Dankworth tape, even). Their exchanges, given Emily’s emotional blockage, are predictably prickly. “You make me feel stupid,” Arden helplessly protests to Emily at one point. “Sorry … ” Emily responds, “that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me.” I guess the point where I lost patience with the movie was when the duo finally made it to the asylum, and Arden decided to distract the inmates by doing an amateur pyrotechnics show on the roof of the drab facility. Your mileage may vary.

What all this has to do with my ruminations at the beginning of the review is this: “My Name Is Emily” was made under more-arduous-than-usual filmmaking circumstances. Its writer/director, Simon Fitzmaurice, is afflicted with motor neuron disease, a condition similar to ALS, which is famously suffered by physicist Stephen Hawking. Mr. Fitzmaurice is confined to a wheelchair and can write and communicate with the assistance of a computer that he interacts with via the movement of his eyes. So, for him to have completed this feature, almost a decade after a diagnosis that at the time had him living for only another four years, makes “My Name Is Emily” a miracle in a way that most other movies aren’t, even if you allow that all successfully completed movies are some kinds of miracles. It also means that if you’re a human being you have a rooting interest in Mr. Fitzmaurice.