The controversial ‘adaptation’ of Emily Brontë’s famous novel has finally arrived. So what did the founder of the Support Group for Concerned Citizens Against the Saltburnification of Wuthering Heights think?
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” opens with a public hanging. It’s quite effective: the horror, and the suggestion that the crowd is somewhat turned on by watching a man suffocate, stiffy and all, to death. It certainly set a tone. I settled in after that wondering if I might have to eat shit and admit I was wrong about Fennell. However, after a somewhat promising beginning, “Wuthering Heights” – the quote marks are part of the title! – meandered on and on between sex and meek-handed horror for two hours and sixteen minutes.
Due to my expectations being abysmally low to begin with I didn’t find the film as horrendous as expected. I was bracing myself to get further enraged, but instead I was just really bored. The trailers and relentless hype really did spill all the beans: the film is nothing more than a highly stylised, loose “adaptation” that really just wants to be a grubbier Bridgerton. I knew Fennell was going to strip the novel down to its most basic parts, and she did. I also knew it was going to be style over substance, which it was. But I did harbour a hope that the frippery might at least prove amusing. It didn’t.
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is nothing like the book. She does away with Cathy’s nasty brother Hindley and instead gives Martin Clunes a ride as an alcoholic dad who pisses and gambles away his and his daughter’s fortune. He is the mushy-faced rot at the heart of the home and it’s upon him that some of Heathcliff and Cathy’s cruelty is blamed (he beats Heathcliff after taking him in on a drunken whim). It’s after Clunes’ character dies (collapsing, after apparently turning into Gollum, between stupidly exaggerated piles of glass bottles) that the film goes swiftly downhill. Fennell does away with the second half of the novel completely (Cathy’s daughter and the next generation of the traumatised) and instead turns Emily Brontë’s book into a fairly trite star-crossed lovers story that hews closer in tone to Romeo and Juliet than to a gothic masterpiece by a strange and brilliant sister.
Only, Fennell is no Baz Luhrmann.
As Cathy, Margot Robbie spends the whole movie either flouncing around in increasingly silly frocks, weeping, or doing some heavy breathing on a rock. Jacob Elordi is a strangely sleepy Heathcliff, a rugged Yorkshire lad who goes off to get a haircut, nice clothes, a gold tooth and a slutty little earring à la Paul Mescal in Hamnet after Cathy runs off to marry for money. Fennell, it’s now clear, was going for Heathcliff as a token of the rugged North. His accent, his sloping figure mucking about with hay in the stables – a stereotypical depiction of a down-and-out Northern servant to contrast with the ludicrously stylised Lintons with their posh Southern accents, books, velvet and arty food. I don’t know enough about England or current North-South politics, but I’d be curious to read some closer-to-home takes on this.
Robbie and Elordi do OK with shallow material, but they can never evoke enough empathy from the viewer to make the final scenes land as intended. In trying to turn Wuthering Heights into a love-above-all narrative, while retaining the cruelty of the characters, Fennell landed in an emotional void. I cry easily – at movies, books, ads, the lot – but couldn’t even muster a chin wobble for Fennell’s Cathy and Heathcliff. Rather I was relieved when it was over and I was free to stumble out into the blazing sunlight, cicadas blasting, ready to swiftly forget pretty much the whole movie.
I struggled to recall the dialogue even moments after leaving the cinema: the script is shamefully sparse and jarring with lame anachronisms. The soundtrack, too, wavers between folk songs, Charli xcx and relentlessly overwrought strings. The whole tone hovers somewhere between an episode of Days of Our Lives (shit-tonnes of dry ice and soft lighting) Bridgerton (elaborate costumes, a plot designed to lead up to sex in a carriage) with a dash of diluted Cronenberg thrown in.
The most interesting character in the film, as in the novel, is Nelly Dean, the educated and scheming servant. There were moments where I thought Fennell might redeem the story by properly deploying this famously unreliable narrator (in the novel, Nelly tells the whole, complicated and sorry tale: she’s a fantastic narrative container and one that should be used!). Instead, Nelly (played by Hong Chau) becomes nothing more than a thorn in Cathy’s side when she tells Cathy’s husband Linton (Shazad Latif) that Heathcliff and Cathy are spending way too much time together getting sweaty on the moors.
I can’t deny that aspects of the film are nice to look at: mainly the landscape doing its moody thing (the parade of frocks and face sparkles quickly turned ridiculous, especially the Red Riding Hood glitter cape). But mostly the visuals went far too far, or too sideways. Wuthering Heights, the house, looked like it wouldn’t be out of place on the set of Stranger Things or Beetlejuice (dangly bits everywhere and rocky walls that looked like painted styrofoam, which they probably were); and that walls-of-skin-room was, in the end, nothing. It served no purpose other than to remind us that Fennell likes to try and shock us.
If all you want is to see Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi yearn, mash some eggs around on a sheet, and have some fairly dull montage sex, go and see the film. But that is really all Fennell’s efforts have amounted to: all the horse tackle, shiny red floors and that gelatinous fish are pointless distractions from a weak script that sought to reduce a complex, brilliant story down to something you might chuck on on a rainy day after you’ve finished bingeing Bridgerton.
