‘Do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you…’
I know that as an English teacher, I should care about preserving the sanctity of Wuthering Heights, but I don’t. It’s already been adapted a bunch of times. It’s there if you want to read it (and if you haven’t, you should), but writer-director Emerald Fennell has been signposting for months that this won’t be your grandmother’s Wuthering Heights. The title is in inverted commas for a reason. For my money, this needs to be faithful to the source material in the same way Clueless was faithful to Emma or The Lion King was faithful to Hamlet. I say all this to point out that all the things that are wrong with this film do not come from thinking that Fennell shouldn’t be messing with Emily Brontë’s classic novel at all. If anything, she doesn’t do enough to make it feel like her own…
I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by relaying the plot. Jacob Elordi is Heathcliffe. Margot Robbie is Catherine. Hong Chau plays Nelly. Alison Oliver is Isabella Linton. Martin Clunes is Cathy’s father. Let’s crack on.
I’ll start with the casting. Heathcliffe doesn’t have to be a person of colour, obviously. He is othered by both his status and his actions anyway. He doesn’t have to be British. He does have to be dark and brooding and desirable, but also bitter and resentful and capable of great evil. Jacob Elordi does all of this and more. He makes for an excellent Heathcliffe. Margot Robbie, on the other hand, with her Barbie good looks and cut-glass accent, fares less well. There is surely nobody who read Wuthering Heights and pictured Cathy like this. It’s not a bad performance by any means; she is vivacious and full of charisma, and she shares a convincing chemistry with Elordi, but she also never feels a comfortable fit in the role. Of the supporting cast, both Chau and Oliver give nuanced and layered performances (where the writing allows) and probably deserve to be in a better adaptation than this one.
Another issue is the set design. The Heights themselves look great from the inside, but the exterior is, and I don’t say this lightly, fucking preposterous. Fennell has spoken in interviews about how she wanted to portray the novel as she imagined it when she was 14 (which is fine), but there needs to be some consistency. You can’t have a Catherine Cookson novel inside and Dracula’s castle on the outside. It makes no sense. And this feeds into a wider problem. Tonally, the film is all over the place. Loads of moments here are meant to be light and playful, but other than some early tomfoolery from Clunes, before his character becomes grotesque and cartoonish, nothing here is actually funny in the same way that both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman were.
Finally, Chali XCX’s soundtrack, excellent in parts, is massively overused, with the same two or three pieces of music repeated several times, the ending overplays the doomed lovers thing (we know they are doomed, we don’t need this spelt out in such a dramatic way), and the love scenes are repetitive, too long and dull. Now, I know all this seems like I hated this movie, but I didn’t. I thought some of the acting was great, some of the set design was great, some of the music was great, etc. But I never got a sense that I was watching anything more than half a great movie. Fennell has proved that she is capable of greatness when she creates something from the ground up. She should return to what she does best.
