DUBAI: Nearly two centuries after Emily Bronte wrote “Wuthering Heights” — a book so savage, so dark, so ‘unfeminine’ that early readers were convinced it was written by a man — filmmaker Emerald Fennell has boldly set out to adapt it for the big screen by all but ignoring the book in its entirety.
So we have swirling mist, heaving bosoms and slow-motion, close-up yearning. But we have almost nothing of Bronte’s elemental novel and its explorations of class inequality, generational trauma and the supernatural. Fennell’s highly-stylized, steamy fever dream seems more invested in aestheticized longing than in the brutal examination of deeper themes.
The film begins with a public hanging, witnessed by young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlottle Mellington as this, young, Cathy, with Margot Robbie playing the older version) and her friend Nellie Dean. Both of them are shortly afterwards introduced to a poor boy picked off the streets of Liverpool by Cathy’s wealthy father. He offers the boy to his capricious daughter as “a pet.” She names him Heathcliff (“Adolescence” breakout star Owen Cooper as a boy, and Jacob Elordi as an adult) and they’re instantly joined at the hip.
As they grow up, childhood attraction turns into adult romance, but the class divide (and daddy’s vanishing wealth) means Cathy must spurn Heathcliff and instead marry her rich neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Heathcliff flees. Two years later, he returns, mysteriously rich and devastatingly handsome. The rest of the film devolves into a petty game of who can be more malicious.
Where the book is wild and violent, the film is polished and visually sumptuous. Where the book gives life to ghosts and vengeance, the film takes pop-song edits of the central romance. The original Cathy and Heathcliff are trauma-bonded individuals who turn young love into ruinous obsession. Bronte’s characters are awful people, driven by ego and their most primal instincts. The ugliness is the point. The film ignores this to deliver a palatable Valentine’s Day release.
There are moments when the film is bearable. The cinematography and set design are undeniably lush. But beautiful scenery can only take you so far.
And, of course, adaptations don’t have to be faithful to be effective. Reinterpretations can, and often do, reveal hidden truths in familiar and beloved works. But this movie murders the original text then kicks the corpse. What remains is closer to fan fiction than Victorian Gothic.
