In an early scene in “Wuthering Heights,” Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) listens as his ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver) explains, in thorough detail, the plot of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” over tea in the garden. Isabella, who has just read the play for the first time, is completely entranced by the fate of the doomed lovers. Edgar, the unwitting victim of her obsession, is less so. He tries to come across as a devoted listener, but his attempts are unconvincing, to say the least. Isabella, so wrapped up in her new discovery, barely notices.
This is one of the most telling moments in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” a loose adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic novel about the passionate love affair between Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). In the press leading up to the release of “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell has spoken at length about her own obsession with this particular novel, and how in adapting Brontë’s work, she wanted to make the type of movie that played in her head while reading the book for the first time as a teenager. In this respect, Fennell feels not unlike Isabella – a young woman captivated by her first brush with all-consuming, madness-inducing passion. Some of the critical responses to the movie so far, on the other hand, feel a bit like Edgar – uninterested in this more anti-intellectual approach.
There are certainly aspects of Fennell’s decision to make the movie she envisioned as a teenager that don’t quite work. If you’ve read “Wuthering Heights,” you know that while it’s about two people in love, it’s also about two people determined to make each other as miserable as possible. It’s about generational trauma, and revenge, and class conflict, and race (Fennell’s response to questions about why she decided not to cast an actor of color in the role of Heathcliff felt particularly lacking). That’s the thing about “Wuthering Heights” – it’s magnificently complex, the kind of thing it’s a little difficult to believe is almost 200 years old.
But, if you’ve read “Wuthering Heights” (especially if you read it as a teenager) you also know that it has the power to warp young minds in the way that not many stories do. Fennell’s film is not so much an adaptation of the novel as it is a visual representation of what it feels like to read “Wuthering Heights” – or, in Isabella’s case, “Romeo and Juliet” – and feel scandalized, shocked, and entranced for the first time. Is there a deep exploration of the thematic complexity of Brontë’s novel? Not really. But, Fennell is clearly more interested in the emotional rather than the intellectual – and in that respect, she wholeheartedly achieves something great.
We open with a hanging where (in typical Fennell fashion), the revelers are aroused to a frenzy by the twitching body suspended in front of them. There, we meet young Catherine (Charlotte Mellington) and her companion, Nelly (Vy Nguyen, and then Hong Chau as an adult), both just as excited as the rest of the crowd. Later at home, Cathy’s drunkard father (Martin Clunes) brings home an orphan who Cathy names Heathcliff (played as a child by Owen Cooper), after a brother who passed away. Heathcliff and Catherine slowly fall in love, but are separated by a tragic misunderstanding, one that pushes Catherine to marry her neighbor, Edgar, who promises more wealth than Catherine has ever known. Years later, Heathcliff returns with vengeance on his mind.
Right off the bat, there are numerous differences between Brontë’s book and the film – characters from the book are combined, and the relationship between young Cathy and Heathcliff feels far more reminiscent of the relationship between Cathy’s daughter and a character named Hareton in the book (the second half of Brontë’s novel is almost never taken into consideration when adapted). These changes often sap the film of what makes the source material so complex, but they keep the focus on what Fennell is most interested in – the romance and tragedy of it all.
One thing that Fennell does keep in mind from the novel is its scandalous sort of sensationalism. Fennell is a maximalist filmmaker, imagining Cathy and Heathcliff’s childhood home as a prison surrounded by dark corners and huge, spiking crags that keep them enclosed. Fennell wears her references on her sleeve, but she knows how to create a moment – the composition of the moors and Heathcliff’s return call to mind the painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” and his departure features a blood red sunset a la “Gone With the Wind” (a very “Wuthering Heights” coded text, when you think about it). Those references are easy to pick out, but they also create a mode of understanding for the audience – this film is reaching for the romantic heights of old Hollywood. We are supposed to understand this film as a heaving expression of emotion and passion.
On a surface level, the movie also touches on the confluence of the beautiful and the grotesque, the idea of being pulled towards something (or someone) that’s toxic – the hanging at the film’s opening captures that idea to garish effect. Young Catherine delights in the hanging, then later cries, shame overcoming any perverted attraction – a back and forth that will follow her throughout the film.
In the book, Cathy and Heathcliff are victims of their circumstances, but ultimately also monsters of their own making. In the film, there is still a sense that they make each other worse, but Fennell is more interested in the outside forces that drive wedges between them – which is absolutely what you latch onto when reading the novel as a teenager. The most glaring example of this is the character of Nelly’s transition from narrator and (mostly) voice of reason in the novel to becoming an outright villain in the film. Before Heathcliff, Nelly and Catherine were the best of friends. His arrival causes a long-gestating jealousy that sets Nelly on a path toward revenge (trust a teenage girl to read “Wuthering Heights” and see Nelly’s understandable protestations over Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship as warfare).
As much as these changes are not in keeping with the book thematically, they capture something intensely special about what it feels like to experience something so wholly transforming as a young person. Robbie and Elordi both have their strengths and weaknesses, much of which have to do with casting (“Wuthering Heights” runs through many years, and when he’s the right age, she feels too old. When she’s the right age, he feels too young). But there is undeniably a sexual pull between them, a magnetism that puts you on the edge of your seat, wondering when they’ll finally give in. The film their connection reminded me of most was “The Notebook” – and there is one hundred percent a scene in the rain that calls to mind the line “Why didn’t you write me?”
The fact that I was reminded of “The Notebook, a movie I watched obsessively as a teenager, is no accident. This is the type of movie we used to post on Tumblr about in 2012, the type of movie that jumpstarts an addiction to romance, that makes an entire generation of young people fall in love with Jacob Elordi (the camera loves Robbie’s face, but is far more interested in sexualizing Elordi than it is her). There is a “baby’s first romance” quality to “Wuthering Heights” that I not only have such an affection for, but that Fennell captures with startling clarity.
