Movie review
Emerald Fennell’s turgid yet weirdly enjoyable “Wuthering Heights” is basically fan fiction; it takes Emily Brontë’s well-known setting and characters and does, well, something else with them. If you read Brontë’s novel and thought hmm, this is pretty good but it really should include at least one public hanging, not to mention Heathcliff and Cathy having a LOT of nooners in the Yorkshire moors, or in carriages, or in strangely unoccupied rooms in a house where you’d think somebody else might wander in, this movie might be just what you’re seeking for a mildly kinky Valentine’s Day date. Whether Brontë is rolling in her grave is, of course, not the point, but maybe someone should check.
Anyway, all’s fair in love and in film adaptations of books no longer under copyright, so it’s probably not even worth bringing up the most obvious oddities: that Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff is hardly the “dark-skinned“ orphan of Brontë’s description, that 35-year-old Margot Robbie as Catherine is a bit of a stretch as a teenage heroine and that having Catherine wear a dress made of cellophane on her wedding night with Edgar (Shazad Latif) is, um, a choice. More to the point, Elordi and Robbie absolutely have chemistry — oh, do they ever; those moors are probably still recovering — and this “Wuthering Heights” definitely kept my attention, for better or worse.
“Wuthering Heights” the book has always been a literary oddity: a work of wild genius and simmering passions, crafted by a quiet young woman who rarely left her father’s Yorkshire parsonage and died there in 1848, aged just 30. Heathcliff and Catherine, brought up in the same remote, unloving home yet unrelated, are two of a kind: soulmates who know they can never be together, and who rail with fury against fate as the moor winds blow. It’s been adapted for the screen multiple times, most famously in 1939 with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and more recently (and quite effectively) by Andrea Arnold in 2012. (Most film adaptations, including Fennell’s, completely ignore the second half of the book, in which a younger generation comes to terms with Heathcliff and Catherine’s dark legacy.)
Fennell here takes the basic thread of the story and runs with it, throwing in vividly saturated colors and elaborate/bizarre art direction (seeing Catherine in her red dress collapsed on a black-and-white checkerboard floor is quite something, like the end of the world’s most dramatic chess match), chopping out some characters and giving new backstories to some who remain. The servant Nelly, who narrates much of the book, is here a paid companion and observer, played with sly knowingness by Hong Chau; Alison Oliver provides some comic relief as a hilariously chatty Isabella. The Yorkshire moors, playing themselves, make a glorious backdrop; while it makes not an iota of sense that Catherine would march across the moors alone, with her wedding dress and veil wildly dancing in the wind, to marry Edgar, it looks undeniably gorgeous. And I wish I had space here to write at length about Jacqueline Durran’s over-the-top costumes, which rival the story in drama. (Just one detail: a red velvet choker on Catherine, looking as if her throat’s been slashed.)
The result is something that isn’t “Wuthering Heights,” but is sort of “Wuthering Heights”-adjacent: two extremely melodramatic (and very good-looking) people flinging themselves toward and away from each other, under some very threatening-looking skies. And, despite all the wall-licking and erotic bread-kneading and leeches and extremely fetishized raw eggs (Fennell is, shall we say, not a particularly subtle filmmaker), it has its moments. When Heathcliff breathily tells a swooning Catherine, “Kiss me, and let us both be damned,” out on those otherworldly moors, it’s the kind of larger-than-life moment that movies are made for. This “Wuthering Heights” is a mess, but an occasionally irresistible one.
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