Switching off all kneejerk attempts to relate this film to the 1847 novel, or care about any kind of period authenticity, I went to see “Wuthering Heights”, starring the excellent actors, Margot Robbie (Barbie, I Tonya) and Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Frankenstein). Young Cathy and Heathcliff are played by Charlotte Mellington and the outstanding Owen Cooper (Adolescence). Martin Clunes is cast against type as a creepy, alcoholic Mr Earnshaw – clearly a nod towards the Brontës’ hapless addict brother, Branwell.
The film probably works best if you let it sweep you away and forget about screaming in futile rage at the screen.
Its title is in inverted commas, a handy warning that the film is not the Wuthering Heights, just a Wuthering Heights. Fair enough. I can set aside expectations and pedantry for cinema. Probably.
Turns out, when you strip away the entire plot of Wuthering Heights and replace it with a new one, it might be hard to sustain interest in the characters. It’s low-key atmospheric but not in a way that’s compelling. The Yorkshire Dales appear to stand in for the Yorkshire Moors, for one thing.
A child’s dolls’ house fantasy
The sets are intriguing, though. Wuthering Heights was lit exactly as it should be – ie: barely, at all. The farm itself looked more like a not very well-maintained Edwardian gents’ toilet – all dank ceramic tiles and dereliction. I laughed out loud when Heathcliff left the Heights and was silhouetted on horseback, in the sunset, under the archway. It looked like a child’s imagining of a farm: and that was the point.
In an interview, director/writer Emerald Fennell said: “I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14.”
Same with the Thrushcross Grange set. It was huge, palatial and totally off kilter. A dolls’ house come to life, camp and impossible. The random stuffed sheep in the décor also gave me a laugh. The dolls’ house symbolism was furthered with Isabella gifting a dolls’ house doll to Cathy – a dolls’ house within a dolls’ house. Heathcliff was little more than Cathy’s doll. When he arrived at the Heights, she promised to make him her “pet”. Later, Isabella is made to wear a dog collar and bark like a dog, by Heathcliff, which is creepy and insane but also (unintentionally?) funny.
An adolescent fever dream
This film misses the mark again and again, but only just. Heavy symbolism and sexual imagery are reminsicent of a 1970s’ Ken Russell epic. Without packing the punch of a Ken Russell film. It is camp but not quite camp enough. It touches on the idea of an adolescent’s fever dream of romance – but then fails to commit to that.
The costumes have caused a furore online for being ‘plastic’ and inauthentic and yet I kind of saw the point. Once she’s elevated to Thrushcross Grange, Cathy wears ridiculous plastic crinolines but she is a doll in a dolls’ house, dressed by a little girl – that’s how she might look. If only the writing had committed more and the earlier costumes been equally ‘made by a child’…
With a set like a doll’s house and ‘Barbie’ playing Cathy, this could have been good fun and yet those things are never made quite overt enough. End result? The director missed a trick.
Elordi was cast because he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. (Read more about the whitewashing casting decisions elsewhere). When diversely cast actors do appear, they are the negative obstacles thwarting Cathy and Heathcliff’s dysfunctional love. Elordi has a decent West Riding accent, almost as good as when a Leeds-born actor played the role (James Howson, in the 2011 version directed by Andrea Arnold). As a Yorkshire person, I find this weirdly important.
Overblown sex and clunky symbolism
The movie has some clunky symbolism – wallpaper made from a scan of Robbie’s skin (I couldn’t side-eye hard enough at this point) and more notoriously, Robbie inserting her finger into a fish’s mouth, another character kneading dough, a gelatinous slug slithering on a windowpane.
At one point, Heathcliff licks the skin-wall. Then there’s the slightly gruelling montage of sex scenes that actually went on so long without advancing the plot, if I’d had a watch on, I’d have looked at it. Cue more heavy-handed symbolism around the idea of Victorian restriction, with a clichéd ‘being-laced-into-a-corset’ scene and a few loving close ups of female characters’ stays, the dolls’ house references – all slightly failing to hit the mark.
The skin wallpaper could be a subconscious reference to a line from the book, when Heathcliff fantasises about: “Painting the house-front with Hindley’s blood!” (Heathcliff, Chapter six).
Could be, but isn’t.
Intriguing concept, brilliant actors but a wasted opportunity
The final scene felt like a hasty re-write when the director realised what pure gold the acting of Owen Cooper truly is. Even Cooper couldn’t save this film though.
It was vaguely atmospheric without ever attempting the unsettling, supernatural feel of the book. What, Wuthering Heights with no ghost?
All in all, it was febrile, adolescent, overblown and hormonal. The slightly stately, middle-aged Edgar Linton – who should be the same age as Cathy and like the ‘cutest’ member of a non-threatening boyband if you’re going with the adolescent girl’s fantasy angle, was dad-coded when he should have been Mark-Owen-in-the-2000s coded.
It’s an excellent concept, to make a Brontë film that is like a piece of juvenilia – dolls in a dolls’ house acting out the story in a febrile, adolescent kind of way. The Brontës are, after all, famous for their juvenilia. They made up whole worlds – Gondal and Angria. Angrier is what I got, as this film trundled on. Because it seems like such a missed opportunity and a waste of some brilliant actors and source material.
I laughed and I (almost) cried with laughter but probably not where the director wanted me to. There were a few decent laughs in there, but I suspect most people don’t go to see “Wuthering Heights” for laughs. I was entertained but not, I suspect, in the way I was supposed to be.
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