This latest version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights struggles between the genuinely imaginative and the silly. It’s not good news that by the end of the picture, silliness has won. Yet the story is a gnarly one and it leaves room for an aggressive filmmaker who wants to stir up the ashes of an old favorite and find something new in it.
In the new movie, a man named Earnshaw has come home from a trip to Liverpool with a young boy he rescued from a beating. In short, the boy, called Heathcliff, becomes profoundly attached to Earnshaw’s daughter Cathy. Their connection has many ups and downs – and that’s an understatement.
Bronte opens her novel with a man seeking refuge from a snow storm at the dreary and lonely house called Wuthering Heights on a bleak and windy northern English moor where Heathcliff now lives. Cathy is long dead, and Heathcliff is still a rude, unwelcoming jerk. Later, this visitor will learn the whole twisted story from a long-serving housemaid.
The story is well-known from the original novel and from the 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, which seems permanently burned into the world’s consciousness.
But the writer and director of this latest vision of the story, Emerald Fennell, lets you know right off that her picture will be a lot less decorous and polite than those famous works. The opening sounds from a dark screen may for a moment suggest sex, but it’s actually the moaning of a man being hanged who, when the scene appears, is twitching because the hanging has been botched. The large crowd watching the spectacle cheer and mock the dying man; puppets mimic the trauma; people behave in all sorts of unseemly ways, and kids make rude jokes about the victim.
The original material is certainly about social class, and the impossible love Heathcliff and Cathy are locked onto with each other. Heathcliff is not of the social status of either the Earnshaw family or the neighboring Lintons, whose son Cathy will eventually – and unhappily – marry. Heathcliff’s behavior runs to the crude and disdainful. You can see that writer/director Fennell wants to make a film for our times and maybe pierce the barrier of manners that people now do not share. So the new Wuthering Heights goes for bluntness and brutality.
"How cross you look – and dirty," Cathy tells Heathcliff in one scene. "I can smell you from here."
He replies: "No one could be in any danger of smelling you. There’s enough perfume to make the eyes water."
As young and inexperienced not-yet lovers, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) witness a perverse sex scene in the barn, and when Heathcliff marries Cathy’s husband’s sister out of spite, his goals are domination, humiliation and revenge.
For a time, the harshness of this Wuthering Heights is interesting; it’s good to see what the film’s 21st century lens finds beneath the surface of mid-19th century social disturbances. And Emily Bronte’s story about the conflict between the demands of a highly formal society and raw human passions leaves plenty of room for all manner of speculation.
But the new film, I think, goes beyond rebellion against restraint to grotesque but empty gesture. The film loses control with Cathy’s costumes, angry sex and the color red. There’s so much red in the film the color runs past meaning and impact. Excess can be liberating – but maybe in moderation – because eventually you start rolling your eyes and hoping for a quick end to the movie.
