1 day ago
5
Trust that I write this sentence as a bona fide, BA-possessing member of the English-major-for-life crowd: No, you’re not going to see Cathy Linton, Hareton Earnshaw, or Linton Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell‘s loose adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel “Wuthering Heights.” And no, you’re not going to miss them. Really.
That’s not to say that Fennell’s serious snipping of Brontë’s original material and her profound pruning of the Earnshaw and Linton family trees isn’t noticeable, but her devotion to the central relationship of Catherine Earnshaw and the mononymous Heathcliff makes for more than enough juicy material for the film‘s 136-minute running time. But if Fennell, who also wrote the film’s script, was bold enough to do away with more than half of its source material and at least nine of its major characters, why didn’t she go further?
Stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi generate plenty of heat for Fennell’s vision of the “greatest love story of all time” (arguable, which seems to be the point of such tagline-based provocations) and a toxic level of longing, but this cut-down take on Brontë’s classic novel should take the advice of its own marketing campaign and truly “come undone.”
Much has been made of the erotic heat between Robbie’s Cathy and Elordi’s Heathcliff, and while purists will be shocked about the level of, uh, interaction between the two (“not text!!”), other audience members might be let down. All the smutty stuff is in the film’s frankly very good trailers, and even then, it’s cut within an inch of its life, hinting at much that doesn’t actually exist. If the promise of the film is, again, to “come undone,” Fennell and the stars haven’t fully met that challenge, at least in the film’s corset-tight narrative.
“Be more pervy,” my notes from the film’s screening include, and that’s a feeling that permeated the last 90 minutes of the film. If you’re going to go there, go there. If love is going to ruin these two, let’s ruin them. (A third act sequence with Elordi and standout co-star Alison Oliver does, however, go suitably wild, though none of it is built around being titillating in the slightest, but the level of ambition and to-hell-with-convention bent is sorely missed elsewhere.)
‘Wuthering Heights‘Instead, however, Fennell chooses to divert that energy to more traditional themes and tones: love ruins Cathy and Heathcliff and just about everyone around them, and keeping them apart is such a toxic endeavor that it batters the sanity, logic, and reason of anyone who comes in contact with them. Edgar, Isabella, Nelly (Hong Chau, the film’s quiet, rage-filled center), they all suffer too. And why not? This story is set in a gruesome, violent, vile world. Hell, the whole thing opens with a public hanging, one attended by both a young Heathcliff (“Adolescence” breakout Owen Cooper) and a positively overjoyed Cathy (Charlotte Mellington).
That public hanging is also where Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes, fearlessly taking on a part both grotesque and pitiable) first sees Heathcliff and, in a fit of empathy, takes the young, silent man under his wing when he sees his father beating him. Mr. Earnshaw really doesn’t have much to offer — despite their sprawling property on the fog-strewn moors, the family isn’t nobility, and they’ve barely got a pot to piss in — but the young man has no other options. Is that romantic? Well, maybe.
‘Wuthering Heights’Brought home to the vicious Catherine and her addled companion Nelly (played as a younger woman by Vy Nguyen), Heathcliff suddenly finds himself the most favored pet of all the Earnshaws. For Mr. Earnshaw, that means Heathcliff is his primary punching bag when, inevitably, the man comes home stinking drunk and with pockets emptied by his (clearly, quite bad) gambling habit. Catherine takes the concept in a different direction, intent on hurting Heathcliff through more emotional means.
By the time the duo are young adults (a little suspension of disbelief is essential to enjoying the film), they’ve been at these horrific games most of their lives. Cathy is spoiled and flighty, Heathcliff is rough and cruel, but Fennell understands what has made these people this way, and she easily imparts that to her audience. While dastardly outsiders, stupid misunderstandings, and half-heard truths eventually tear the two apart, the great tragedy of “Wuthering Heights” is that it’s hard to imagine how any of this could have played out differently.
And while Fennell does often find ways to toy with aspects of their doomed romance, she is still constrained by all of its inevitability. Even without the existence of Brontë’s second generation (or Cathy’s cruel brother), certain story plots still need to flow on, like that Cathy’s snobbish and self-destructive manner will lead her to marrying rich new neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif, playing one of the few characters we can never get a real handle on) and driving a horrified Heathcliff away in the process.
In one of the film’s most evocative montages (in a film that leans far too hard on them), we watch Cathy spin through entire years at the Linton family estate, Thrushcross Grange, a mash-up of Barbie Dream House and Alice’s Wonderland, pink and big-skirted and high-haired and bubbly and be-ribboned and just so, so wrong. If she’s trying to distract herself from the loss of Heathcliff, the spectacular sequence works a trick, for both Cathy and the audience.
‘Wuthering Heights’Fennell and her craftspeople seem to have turned most of her bent toward dark, dark humor onto the film’s lavish, lush, and often just quite silly (complimentary!) production and costume design. You may already know about Cathy’s bedroom at the Grange, with walls and headboard made to match Edgar’s favorite color: her skin. It even includes veins and freckles! When Robbie first strokes the plush walls, her Cathy stares with the appropriate mix of awe and terror. My freckles?
The Grange proper is both overstuffed (the close-walled garden is replete with things) and achingly empty. Cathy is constantly crossing vacant rooms with little furniture, crimson-red floors that look as if they were made from spilled blood, and the world’s most upsetting fireplace. Edgar appears to possess a love of jellied food: suspended, easy to see, disgusting to touch.
Edgar’s unhinged ward Isabella, already a hoot in Oliver’s capable comedic hands, makes off with the best props of the entire film, from a dollhouse that looks just like the Grange (clever camerawork from Fennell’s “Saltburn” cinematographer Linus Sandgren bends the space and time between the two with startling effect) to a scrapbook she gifts to Cathy that’s hilariously, uneasily erotic. Whatever wavelength Oliver is operating on best suits Fennell’s apparent aims with her take on the story, and its absurdity alone recommends the film.
‘Wuthering Heights’The Earnshaw family’s home at Wuthering Heights itself is a nightmare (again, complimentary), seemingly made of both raw ore and shiny tile, a deep, dark mine that appears made to hurt. Lean too hard on one wall of the kitchen, and you might actually be impaled. Water drips from the rocky walls just behind it, pig blood backs up the drains of the stables, and booze bottles eventually overtake Mr. Earnshaw’s parlor. No wonder Cathy wanted out so badly.
Fennell and Sandgren’s compositions are frequently awe-inspiring, from a sequence that sees Cathy sweeping across the moors in her wedding dress to the eventual foggy reunion between the lovers that slowly pulls Elordi into relief while a searching Cathy searches for clarity. It looks stunning, even when it turns oddly stagy and confined (the Earnshaw family home looks like a set, and while that might be the point, that intention seems out of place in this otherwise richly made world).
Clocking in at over two hours, there’s no lack of dazzling design and insane ideas to keep every minute of Fennell’s feature thrilling to watch. As with all of Fennell’s films, boredom is never on offer. And yet, that doesn’t entirely dissipate the feeling that something is still missing here. By cutting so much of Brontë’s sprawling novel down to the quick, by focusing so squarely on just Cathy and Heathcliff, we’re trapped only in the immediacy of their doomed affection, which is never allowed to be hot enough to make the entire effort come together, let alone come undone.
Grade: B
Warner Bros. will release “Wuthering Heights” in theaters on Friday, February 13.
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