Emerald Fennell’s latest cinematic endeavor reimagines Emily Brontë’s timeless novel, “Wuthering Heights,” painting the screen with tempestuous weather and dramatic displays of affection. The film, a visually rich but perhaps overly embellished take, stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the iconic, ill-fated lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff.
An evocative still from the film features Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine, both clad in dark 19th-century attire, standing against a wild, windswept moor, capturing the raw essence of their tumultuous relationship. (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
For her shiny new take on “Wuthering Heights,” the writer-director Emerald Fennell has drenched the screen with torrential rain, filled it with pantomimes of passion and tried hard to compete with Emily Brontë. What a mistake! Over the past century or so, Brontë’s only novel has been nipped and tucked in assorted adaptations — for film, television, theater, opera, ballet and song — that have pushed and pulled it in different directions. It’s been glossed up, brought down to earth and read through the lenses of gender, class and race. Yet like its violently emotional lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, the book resists taming.
That’s reassuring to the novel’s admirers, though it must be frustrating to those who try to bend it to their will, as Fennell has attempted to do in her floridly expressionistic telling. Starring the unconvincingly paired Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, this iteration takes the usual liberties, as Fennell splashes on the color, cranks up the heat, embraces literalism, piles on surrealistic touches, deploys anachronisms and strives to bridge the past and the present. Like Samuel Goldwyn, who produced the swoony, highly polished 1939 Hollywood version, Fennell (whose movies include “Saltburn”) has also added quotation marks around the title, a move that underlines its provenance and announces her own authorship.
Like the better-known screen adaptations of the novel, this “Wuthering Heights” only incorporates the book’s famous first half. Published in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, the book is divided into two volumes rich with meaningful doubles. Shortly after the story opens, Catherine’s father announces that he’s going to Liverpool. A 6-year-old who can, Brontë writes, “ride any horse in the stable,” she asks him to bring her back a whip; her father instead returns with an enigmatic stray, a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child.” Christened Heathcliff, he becomes Catherine’s playmate, her surrogate brother and her great, tormented, tormenting, unconsummated love. Their story ends tragically with unhinged sublimity.
Fennell follows the arc of the first volume with some instructive changes. The movie opens with two children, Catherine (Charlotte Mellington) and Nelly (Vy Nguyen), watching a public hanging. As the dying man thrashes, he becomes erect, which turns on some spectators (cue excited leering and even some humping) and introduces Fennell’s blunt approach, including her almost aggressively unsubtle handling of the novel’s linkage of sex with death. Once Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) arrives, Nelly is sidelined as he and Catherine develop an unruly, like-minded conspiracy of two. Soon, though, these synchronized wildings are swapped for Robbie’s dewy Catherine and Elordi’s lavishly hirsute Heathcliff, and they are racing even faster across the moors toward their destiny.
Like its appealing leads, much of what follows is lightly engaging for a time. There’s a lot to look at, for starters, from the windswept landscape to the foreboding, dilapidated manor, where Catherine’s family lives and which gives the novel its title. Like the movie’s costumes, the production design here does a great deal of work throughout, telegraphing and repeatedly broadcasting Fennell’s ideas and preoccupations. The lustrous black exterior of the Heights manor, for one, resembles the enormous rock face that hovers right next to it like a threat and, in places, even seems to be jutting through its interior walls. It’s as if the Heights, having been hewed from this hard earth, is doomed, like its characters, to be swallowed up by it.
Fennell has ditched some of the novel’s familiar elements, including its framing. In the book, the story emerges piecemeal through a handful of characters, including a servant, who isn’t a necessarily reliable narrator. Although Fennell retains that servant’s name, Nelly (played as an adult by Hong Chau), she is now Catherine’s bookish, peevish companion; mostly she’s just another prop. Fennell also eliminates Catherine’s brother, whom Heathcliff effectively supplants in the novel, helping to stoke its suggestion of sibling incest. Here, though, it’s her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), who looms first as an emblem of patriarchal authority and then of impotent dissipation, a switch that attenuates the incest theme.
Robbie and Elordi hold your attention well enough, though they’re more persuasive apart than when they’re together. Fennell certainly puts them through their paces, giving them a feature-length workout; they run and race, storm and stress. In keeping with her stylized approach, she sometimes puts them in iconic poses — Heathcliff glowers on horseback against an angrily blazing sky — as if to emphasize the story’s classicism. As in some other versions, she also makes explicit Catherine and Heathcliff’s love if more overtly, translating Brontë’s more heated passages into some unsexy grappling. Fennell has been conspicuously taken with the idea of Heathcliff as a whip, which she cracks to diminishing effect.
Each iteration of Brontë’s novel speaks to the era in which it was made, of course (intentionally or not). Watching a movie titled “Wuthering Heights” certainly creates expectations, but those can be pleasurably met, subverted or ignored, and what’s on the screen is finally paramount. One problem with Fennell’s take, though, is that she wants to focus on the lovers while saying a lot about a lot. She tosses out ideas about women, men, sex, freedom and dominance, even while eliding the question of Heathcliff’s race, and trying to transmit the power of Brontë’s writing visually. Some of this is banal. Such is the case when, after some torturous narrative turns, Catherine weds her wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), her new suffocating life is signaled by a dollhouse replica of her marital home.
Catherine’s new home proves quite the 19th-century Barbie’s dream house by way of Wes Anderson and a splash of Tim Burton. It’s crammed with outwardly playful, at times self-consciously eccentric flourishes, like the gleaming blood-red floor of the library, an oddly vast, relatively book-free space anchored by an enormous fireplace crawling with what look like plaster casts of hundreds of human hands. There’s more — so much more — including her simpering sister-in-law, Isabella (Alison Oliver), a human kick-me sign, and the soft, light-beige walls of Catherine’s bedroom that have been designed to resemble her skin, marbled veins and all. Why? Why not? Each room offers more sumptuous, strainingly clever details that expound on the same themes without deepening them. It’s like being force-fed candy.
Every reader makes “Wuthering Heights” into her own, and the same holds true for Fennell. Yet as the movie progresses — especially after Catherine and Heathcliff temporarily go their separate ways — Fennell’s embellishments grow more exaggerated and distracting, and her hold on the story becomes increasingly tenuous. When Heathcliff at last returns from his wanderings, he has cleaned up immeasurably. His cheeks have been shaved, and there’s a gold earring winking under his layered hair. He looks the very picture of the dashing, brooding romantic lead. He’s an old-fashioned stereotype, and finally, so too is Catherine. You may miss Brontë’s strange vision — as well as the wildness of the woman who loves Heathcliff, who insists she is Heathcliff — but they’re all still very much alive on the page.
Movie Details: Wuthering Heights
- Directed by: Emerald Fennell
- Writers: Emerald Fennell, Emily Brontë
- Stars: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Alison Oliver, Shazad Latif
- Rating: R
- Running Time: 2h 16m
- Genres: Drama, Romance
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Wuthering Heights
Rated R for violence, rough sex and death. Running time 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.