‘Wuthering Heights’ Isn’t Faithful to the Book. Does It Even Need to Be? — Opinion

[Editor’s note: This story contains spoilers for “Wuthering Heights,” now playing in theaters.]

Saying that Emerald Fennell‘s “Wuthering Heights” is adapted from the classic Emily Brontë novel is a bit like saying “The Lion King” is an adaptation of “Hamlet.” In the broad strokes, yes, both the Disney movie and the classic Shakespeare tragedy featured a murdered king, an avenging prince, and a scheming uncle. But tonally, there’s a world of difference between the stark Danish tragedy and the triumphant animated musical.

So it goes with Fennell’s take on one of gothic literature’s crowning achievements, which is less a retelling of the novel than it is a portrait of what it feels like to read the novel and close its pages with the lingering feeling of a crush on the brooding bad boy at its center.

In the months leading up to the release of “Wuthering Heights” and through the (admittedly a bit exhausting) promo run for the film, there’s been plenty of online discourse around the movie’s perceived lack of respect to its source material. Some complaints — like scrutiny over Jacob Elordi’s casting as the famously ethnically ambiguous Heathcliff (more on that in a second) — were valid to consider.

Other gripes — about how the trailers, in all their erotic splendor and brightly colored euphoria and original Charli XCX tracks, weren’t capturing the grim, claustrophobic, obsessive milieu of the Brontë novel — were perhaps a bit too pedantic and close-minded about how this story could be retold and reinterpreted.

To all this noise, a proposition: let movie adaptations of classics be unfaithful. Let them play fast and loose with the material, and let the directors take whatever it is about the source material that interests them and throw out everything else.

Fidelity has really never been equivalent to quality when it comes to book-to-screen treatments, after all: think of a movie like “The Shining,” which turned a tragic redemptive story into an icy, pitiless portrait of a psychopath. Or the classic 1931 “Frankenstein,” which took Mary Shelley’s heady treatise on the nature of mankind and streamlined it into a perfect piece of pulpy monster movie magic. For as long as film as an art form has existed, it’s been desecrating and disrespecting literature — it’s just that most people don’t care as long as the end product is good.

And after all, would a faithful adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” even work coming from Fennell, a director whose first two films — “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn” — were amazing at capturing ephemeral vibes and tended to flounder when it came time to say something “important?”

The filmmaker delivers easily her best work yet with “Wuthering Heights,” a movie that achieves emotional and thematic coherence, a first in her career, by plunging itself into a horny tale about two screwed-up people who can’t keep their hands off one another. It’s nothing like the book, and really, that’s mostly a good thing, because all the changes result in a movie that plays directly to its creator’s strengths.

‘Wuthering Heights’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Once you cast aside the idea that this film is a retelling of the original novel, and accept it as just a work that uses the broad archetypes of Brontë’s text for its own design, most of the changes that Fennell makes in “Wuthering Heights” the movie scan much more cleanly.

What she added is pretty self-evident, and it’s largely the explicitly erotic bits — even someone who has never read the original novel can probably guess that Brontë didn’t write a scene in which Heathcliff catches Catherine (Margot Robbie) masturbating and proceeds to slurp up the bodily fluids from her hand. Brontë’s original novel takes the absolute opposite approach: Catherine and Heathcliff’s story is one of thwarted passion and repression, and the two don’t even kiss before her tragic death.

The film vaguely follows the basic outline of the first half of the novel, heavily streamlining the twisted tale of family strife and generational trauma into a more conventional tragic romance centered squarely on Catherine and Heathcliff. Brontë’s book features an entire second generation of characters who have their own story following Catherine’s death, and that other half of the novel is completely excised from this adaptation — Fennell even has Catherine miscarry before her death rather than keep her daughter (also named Catherine!) alive.

Fennell also cut is the novel’s frame story, in which the events of the story are told by the housekeeper Nelly (played in the movie by Hong Chau) to an outside observer years after all the sorrowful drama that befouled Heathcliff and Cathy.

Nelly herself is heavily reinterpreted by Fennell, imagined in this film as the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat who serves as Cathy’s maid; the film also runs with modern readings of her character as a more proactive meddler in the doomed love between the main characters. Catherine’s brother Hindley, a vicious bully whose abuse is part of what drives Cathy and Heathcliff so closely together, is cut entirely, his role combined with Catherine’s father. Isabella (Allison Oliver) is changed from the sister of Catherine’s eventual husband Edgar to his ward — an alteration that has little material effect on the plot other than possibly to make this whole love square less vaguely incestuous when Heathcliff marries her.

The shifts in the supporting cast have a huge effect on what’s arguably the main tonal change to this story, moreso than any of the sexual sequences. There’s a popular (and incorrect) refrain online nowadays that “‘Wuthering Heights’ isn’t a romance,” which is deeply reductive about what romance as a genre can accomplish. It’s understandable why readers feel this way though, because it can’t be stressed enough that the bond between the book’s Catherine and Heathcliff is an obsessive, toxic love, and that both are fundamentally horrible people in their own special ways.

Fennell’s film might seem edgier in its more explicit content, but it actually sands some of the edges off of its leads’ more despicable actions. In doing so, it presents a version of their relationship that’s maybe not idealized, but is certainly more sympathetic than anything Brontë ever wrote. In the book, Catherine’s famous “I am Heathcliff” speech is more terrifying than it is swoonworthy, a declaration of how her entire identity has been consumed and erased by her attachment to a man she can not be with. In Fennell’s film? That subtext is there, but she isn’t necessarily playing into it, either.

The Heathcliff of the movie is also a very different beast than the Heathcliff of the novel, a tormented anti-hero rather than a cruel villain. While most of his worst acts come in the novel’s cut second half, this softening is especially notable in his relationship with Isabella, which in the book is explicitly emotionally abusive, with some potential implications of physical or sexual abuse. In the film, he’s open about marrying her purely to spite Catherine, and enters a cheerfully anachronistic BDSM pairing in which he treats her as a dog, both of which she knowingly agrees to.

This leads us to the matter of Heathcliff’s race — a hotly debated topic that, contrary to what people on the internet may tell you, is a question that doesn’t really have a clear answer. To start: yes, Heathcliff is described in many ways that do very definitively suggest he is not a white Englishman by the standards of the time period, including but not limited to “gypsy brat,” “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway,” a child who could be the son of “the Emperor of China” or “an Indian queen.” One of the most recent adaptations of the novel, the 2011 version by Andrea Arnold, notably leaned into this aspect of the book by casting the multiracial James Howson as Heathcliff.

‘Wuthering Heights’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

At the same time, “not white” was a much broader concept at the time the novel was written, and with so many contradictory statements about his physical appearance in the source material, scholars have alternatively offered up arguments that Heathcliff could be Romani, Black, South Asian, Irish, Spanish, or Italian. The point is less the specifics of his ancestry and more that he’s an “other” in polite society of the time period, a face that stands out in the world Catherine belongs to.

Fennell shows little interest in this aspect of the novel and very much downplays its impact on how Heathcliff is treated as an outsider. Not for nothing, Edgar — a character whose conventional fair-skinned looks are put in stark contrast with Heathcliff’s darkness in the book — is portrayed by South Asian actor Shazad Latif.

It’s important to note that Fennell absolutely is not the first person to make an “inaccurate” “Wuthering Heights,” although few have been quite so loud about it. Pretty much every single filmed version of the novel, the main exception being the 1992 version that saw Ralph Fiennes make his feature film debut, cuts out the second generation characters to focus on the far more famous and well-remembered Heathcliff and Catherine parts of the novel.

A lot of these films play the duo as more straightforward star-crossed lovers, or at least make Catherine more of a sympathetic heroine. And yes, there is a long history of casting white guys as Heathcliff: Laurence Olivier was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the byronic hero in the 1939 adaptation, which is generally held up as the best filmed take on the novel.

Expectations of an adaptation’s strict adherence to its source material have always been a part of book fandom. It’s proven an especially pervasive strain of thought in the modern media landscape, between the obsession with “canon” that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has wrought and the waves of glossy TV show adaptations that stretch out to adapt nearly every scene in a novel. But not even a limited series would be an easy fit for “Wuthering Heights,” a book whose stuffy reputation as a classic obfuscates just how deeply messed up and delirious it actually is.

Uncharitable online critics have mocked a quote from Fennell about how “you can’t adapt a book as dense, and complicated, and difficult” as “Wuthering Heights,” but she has a point. The power of Brontë’s novel comes from its complex structure and dark, unfiltered prose that envelops you in the swirling, all-encompassing obsession of its protagonists. Even the “faithful” adaptations have never successfully captured what makes “Wuthering Heights” “Wuthering Heights.”

That Fennell doesn’t bother trying and instead does her own thing, crafting a version of “Wuthering Heights” that’s whittled down to the elements that most interest her, isn’t sacrilege. In a way, that’s how adaptations of novels work in general, although few do it with less care or anxiety for what purists will think of the end result.

Unfaithful adaptations can be bad, but not entirely because they’re unfaithful: take the Netflix adaptation of “Persuasion,” which scooped out all of the heartbreak and regret of Jane Austen’s novel and left a hollow shell of nothing. Guillermo del Toro’s recent “Frankenstein” was a version of Mary Shelley’s novel that created unintentional dissonance in how it faithfully followed the general plot while flattening all of its themes into their most basic and unexamined form.

“Wuthering Heights” the film works because it has what those adaptations desperately need: a strong point of view. Fennell replaces all that gothic repression she’s discarding with something substantial in her obsession with moist, erotic yearning. The Heathcliff and Cathy that Elordi and Robbie play may not be the Heathcliff and Cathy of the novel (nor even the iconic Kate Bush song), but they’re compelling in their own ways, a tangled web of lust and messy co-dependency that captures a nugget of truth from the Brontë novel without paying slavish devotion to it.

In an era in which fewer people are reading novels for pleasure, it can be easy to hand-wring over a movie like “Wuthering Heights,” to postulate on how a new generation will be introduced to a classic via a film as uninterested in becoming a high school English class viewing staple as this.

But Brontë’s novel is an eternal nightmare, one that has haunted readers for two centuries. Fennell, in providing a take on the material, has zero obligation to stay true to a legacy that will ultimately endure far beyond her own movie. Why not let her have some fun with it?