Wuthering Heights opens in theaters on February 13.
Three years after Wuthering Heights was first published under the pen name Ellis Bell, Charlotte Brontë, the sister of its true author, Emily Brontë, issued a correction in its new edition. “The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised,” she wrote in 1850. “Its import and nature were misunderstood.”
That sentiment holds up with the arrival of “Wuthering Heights”, writer-director Emerald Fennell’s fast and loose adaptation of the beloved book. I now understand why she opted to put the title in quotation marks, because this is by no means a faithful homage. It’s shallow fan fiction that has more in common with E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey than Brontë’s unflinching portrait of obsessive love, vengeance, the violence of class, racism and generational trauma. If, as Fennell has said, this is her teenage recollection of Wuthering Heights, then it speaks more to the white affluence of her upbringing than Brontë’s novel.
The writer-director dispenses with the book’s beginning and end, as well as multiple characters who fully contextualize the toxic atmosphere of the eponymous estate. Instead, she opens with black and the grunting sounds of a man. Is he having sex? No, he’s being strangled to death in a contrived public hanging scene, gleefully watched by young heroine Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), as other kids laugh at his “stiffy” and the camera follows some common folk engaging in promiscuity. This sets the highly sexualized tone for the rest of the film, charting Cathy’s sexual awakening from child to “spinster,” as her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), calls her, once Margot Robbie takes over the role.
There’s been valid criticism of the whitewashing of “dark-skinned gipsy” orphan Heathcliff, a role shared by Owen Cooper and Jacob Elordi, who washes up at Wuthering Heights via Mr. Earnshaw – no longer the novel’s loving adoptive parent but redrawn in, from the book, Hindley Earnshaw’s revolting, drunken likeness (Hindley being his son, who doesn’t appear in the film). But Robbie’s casting is equally ill-fitted. The novel’s Catherine is a dark-haired, dark-eyed teen, whose unruly stubbornness and violent love that she shares with a similarly-aged Heathcliff speaking volumes for their juvenile nature.
Robbie looks amazing for 35, but here her age works against the authenticity of Catherine’s youthful recklessness. She struggles to exude the naivety of a teen who thinks she can have her cake and eat it, by having both Heathcliff and the social status of wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), after he moves into the nearby Thrushcross Grange and proposes.
Robbie and Elordi are obviously very attractive people, and with the number of steamy sex scenes shoehorned in, you’d be forgiven for thinking this amounts to palpable chemistry. But it all feels too forced, like a sales bin, smutty romance novel come to life, working too hard to hide the erasure of Brontë’s far more complex ideas about the hell of societal convention.
That’s due in large part to the script, which ignores the Gothic supernatural elements and too often paraphrases Brontë’s earnest, expressive dialogue in key scenes. Fans hoping to hear Catherine’s “If all else perished, and he remained” speech will be left wanting. It also strips away the compelling social commentary about Heathcliff’s ethnic ambiguity and sanitizes the brutality of his revenge narrative, softening Heathcliff’s aggressive cruelty into something coldly charismatic. His Yorkshire accent isn’t bad, but Elordi’s performance recalls his Euphoria character, Nate, more than Brontë’s antagonistic antihero.
Supporting players like Nelly (Hong Chau) and Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) fare better. While Nelly’s backstory is changed from servant to bastard companion, Chau affords Nelly a quiet composure as a vulnerable witness to (and sometimes meddler in) Catherine and Heathcliff’s destructive romance. As Edgar’s ward (she’s his sister in the book), Oliver nails Isabella’s sickly sweet innocence. Even as the film weirdly pushes Isabella to evoke the spirit of Brontë’s Catherine, she brings a deviant edge to her infatuation with Heathcliff. It’s a wonder they didn’t just cast the Irish actor as the lead.
The same could be said for Latif, who, as a mixed British-Pakistani actor, better fits the profile of Heathcliff. The novel even describes him as a “little Lascar,” the name for a sailor from the Indian subcontinent. Where Brontë’s Edgar is laced with snobbish hostility towards Heathcliff, thus becoming a mighty catalyst for the low-born lad to exact revenge against him, Latif’s iteration barely registers. He rarely engages with his rival and, as with the silk wallpaper modelled after Catherine’s skin, serves merely as window dressing. His color blind casting ticks the box for diversity, but Fennell gives him little character to work with.
Her approach to the class divide feels somewhat hackneyed, too. The lilt of the Yorkshire accent is relegated to the lower class, where Fennell throws in sexual deviancy as a marker, too. Film and TV frequently stereotype the Yorkshire accent this way, but the Earnshaws aren’t landed gentry; they didn’t require posh accents like the Lintons to reinforce the upstairs-downstairs dynamic.
Cinematographer Linus Sandgren does capture the tumultuous beauty of the Yorkshire Moors and the stormy atmosphere of the Heights estate, but the production design of Thrushcross Grange is jarringly anachronistic. It becomes a Gothic Barbie Dreamhouse (derogatory), with the costuming, though beautiful, more in keeping with an Alice in Wonderland film. Throw in Charli xcx’s pulsating original songs and Anthony Willis’s overwhelming score, and you’ve got a bombastic world that does more to distract than solidify the emotional journey of these iconic literary figures.
I don’t believe all book-to-screen adaptations need to be carbon copies. And maybe if you haven’t read the novel, “Wuthering Heights” will work for you. But I must have read a different book in my teens than Fennell, because her vision obscures my memory of it – as it will for many Wuthering Heights fans out there.
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