I often really appreciate adaptations that take big swings. I love Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, Cuaron's Great Expectations, Branagh's Hamlet, so "Wuthering Heights", a film so liberally adapted for the screen it has quotations around the title, is right up my ally, especially from a film maker as bold and self-assured as Fennell. Admittedly she has taken the bare bones of Bronte's novel (taking out many characters) to focus on the doomed and rather toxic love between Heathcliff and Cathy.
Often a modern adaptation of a period novel must take liberties for the story to have the emotional impact the original would have had in its time. What would have been laced with scandal for an 1850s audience might seem quaint to today's crowd. Fennell understands this and injects her story with modern indelicacies designed to resonate in the way Bronte's dark tale might have then. Fennell makes it romantic in that dark and twisted way Bronte's novel reads with a historic lens. Her Cathy and Heathcliff are damaged, emotionally stunted individuals whose flailings at love and sexuality do more harm than good. Her Isabella is looking to be dominated. Her Edgar is less bothered by his cuckolding than protecting his line. These aren't Bronte's versions of these characters, they are Fennell's and she is mixing a smutty fanfic vibe with a class analysis in a similar naughty and subversive style to her film Saltburn.
There are interesting ideas going on here. In her (at this time) rather short filmography, Fennell shows she is rather deft at subverting our expectations and in so critiquing her subjects effectively. The film starts with a black screen and what we assume are the sounds of sex, only to have it revealed it is the sound of a public hanging and how the crowd enters an almost ecstatic state upon the condemned's death. She is telling us that she is using this story to explore western culture's intersections between cruelty, sex, death, love, and oppression. This isn't a heartwarming love story.
Much has been made about the casting of Elordi who doesn't fit the "Lascar" description in the book. Maybe this is a mistake. Perhaps this has to do with the film focusing more on the class constructions than the racial ones... at least in the Healthcliff/Cathy relationship. She instead focuses her lens on racism on the character of Nelly, played with wonderful subtlety by Hong Chau. In another change from the book, Nelly's class isn't the issue but her birth as both a "bastard" and a racial minority which sets her in the role of servant to the rest. Her actions are deliciously ambiguous in terms of her motivations and she appears both sympathetic and rightfully resentful of Cathy as well as the Earnshaws and Lintons in general. Often read as a villain from the novel, Chau and Fennell don't allow Nelly to be that simple as she is often one of the most relatable characters in the film. She is quite often portrayed as reading, again a subtle signal to the audience.
Fennell takes quite a few liberties with the story and characters and narrows the focus of what is a dense and complicated novel. For me she was quite successful in telling the story she wanted to tell about self destructive people (and honestly people with a somewhat repressed desire to destroy others) who were never taught how to love trying to love. It is bold and vivacious filled with innuendo and sexuality, humour and operatic tragedy. "Wuthering Heights" is gorgeous, decorated with incredible art direction and costumes so that the whole film feels light a heightened (pun intended) historical reality, like a dream or a nightmare. It is audacious in its visuals, sexuality, and dialogue, but layered with suggestion and nuance with its more critical themes. While this may not be to many's tastes, it worked for me and I couldn't look away.
Audiences who wanted to see the novel adapted more religiously may be disappointed as this film goes off on the side quests it wants to, leaving much of the novel behind. But if you can wrap your expectations around a dirty little love tragedy featuring terrible/beautiful people you just want to shelter from their own wretchedness while screaming at them to grow up, then Fennell's adaptation is something truly rich to enjoy.
"Wuthering Heights"
Starring: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Owen Cooper, Charlotte Mellington, Chazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell
Writer/Director: Emerald Fennell
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