‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” has already earned the quotations marks around its title in the eyes of a great many fans of Emily Brontë’s original 1847 Gothic novel from the press campaign alone, featuring a trailer backed by blaring Charli XCX pop music and pairing Aussie stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the thoroughly English Cathy and Heathcliff, seemingly doomed lovers on and off screen, with a marketing tour built around the vague suggestion of a real-life romance between the two leads.
As that online howl from voracious readers would suggest, this is far from your typical English Lit adaptation, playing fast and loose with its source material, a novel embraced as a Canonical classic yet noted for a slew of previous film retellings who all felt the struggle of trying to grapple with the original’s generational narrative and the richness of the text itself.
I’ve yet to read Wuthering Heights – my knowledge of Cathy and her troubles has been throughly limited to the music of Kate Bush – and the danger with any adaptation is that you run the risk of painting the wrong picture of your original inspiration and, in doing so, pull up the ladder behind you. It’s no secret that good film adaptations can shine a light on older material and bring it back into the zeitgeist for a whole new generation – Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune trilogy, set to culminate this December, has turned sandworms and blue-eyed visionaries from tawdry 80s quirks into modern mainstream icons.
It’s clear that Fennell has been allowed to make the film that she wanted to and adapt the book however she liked – everything here really echoes Saltburn, which saw massive success, and feels characteristic of her work – but time will tell if those same teenage viewers that Fennell is clearly aiming to reach with this picture (rated 15) find themselves inspired to pick up Brontë’s novel.
“Wuthering Heights” has billed itself as a modern take on a far older story, looking to unearth something new through a hyper-focus on female sexuality. Its original trailer invites us to ‘Fall in love again and again’ (and again and again and, well you get the idea…) and sees Cathy kneading dough with suggestive tension as a bearded, hunky Heathcliff walks into the room. Huge billboards read ‘Drive me mad’ with further innuendo quite clearly on display and yet upon finally seeing the film, nicely teed up for release just before Valentine’s Day to make for the perfect date night this weekend, the whole affair (pun intended) feels characterised by a severe lack of intensity or titillation.
Fennell clearly believes she’s telling a steamy story of inevitable yet forbidden and doomed romance and yet it’s very hard to follow her down the rabbit hole for the ride, even as Anthony Willis’ orchestral score mingles with Charli XCX’s original songs to create a clever push-and-pull between the story’s classical roots and this supposedly fresh new take. The foundation of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship is absolutely there – their innocent childhood adventures brought to life by Charlotte Mellington and the star of last year’s Adolescence, Owen Cooper – but in flashing forward eight years to the pair as young adults, now Robbie and Elordi, their new dynamic feels far more theatrical and lacking in the natural authenticity seen previously.
Cathy’s awakening feels artificial and oddly old-fashioned rather than new and empowering and due to the confines of the story, just as things might be reaching something interesting, the two find themselves separated on different paths for an extended portion of the movie in a way that feels disappointing rather than heartbreaking.
As the film progressed, I felt fascinated by how much I believed in the two characters themselves without getting drawn into their bond as lovers. In the time leading up to this release, I had concerns about their ages compared to the characters – Margot Robbie is seven years older than her romantic co-star and neither are close to eighteen – but was surprised by how little difference that made in the end. The issue, instead, is that they somehow felt like a pair of mismatched magnets; the wrong Heathcliff for the wrong Cathy.
Yes, opposites can attract but they seemed to be two characters taken from separate adaptations and paired alongside each other in a way that felt strangely reminiscent of some of the recent Marvel movies’ mashing up different iterations of the same characters and storylines. As far as characterisation is concerned, Elordi plays far more into the physical aspect of the dynamic than Robbie, who feels limited in what she’s allowed to do and how far she’s allowed to take the character.
By the nature of the narrative and the societal themes at play here, one of Cathy’s great struggles is that she’s something of a caged bird – the beautiful wife of a seemingly doting husband, spoiled with riches yet all the while unhappily longing for the man she unwittingly spurned – but even in the moments where we ought to feel a sense of her breaking free from those shackles, the intensity and catharsis is near-completely absent bar a few flashes. I was all-in and ready for an outrageous new take on a near-200-year-old story, but in a worrying pattern, as was the case with Saltburn, I just didn’t feel that the film was anywhere near as out-there as it tried to be. Even its wildest moments just felt unearned or overdone compared to the promise of that fantastic first trailer.
The film looks gorgeous. We all know Fennell can shoot a country manor and make it look captivating and ornate, but there’s a healthy heap of Brontë-appropriate misty moors marked with deep maroons and rugged outcroppings. The costuming lends vibrant reds and gleaming whites to Cathy’s dresses, and the backdrops have a stage quality to them – like matte paintings – that feels weirdly apt for the ballpark of an 1800s adaptation. I especially liked Elordi as Heathcliff, who did seem to get the measure of things at times, but he and Cathy together feel like different characters from different drafts of the script that clash far more than compliment one another. The hybrid score, weaving between classical and contemporary, tries its best to lift the narrative and, alongside Elordi, nearly steers the ship into port for a satisfying final ten minutes but the film definitely overstayed its welcome despite several promising elements that could otherwise have coalesced into something stronger.
“Wuthering Heights” is in cinemas on 13 February
