Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” with an overabundance of emphasis on those cheeky quotation marks, is a fascinating document; not as an adaptation of the Emily Brontë source material, which has been done better elsewhere, but as proof that oftentimes the way someone reworks a classic story through a twenty-first-century lens speaks more to the adapter than the work itself. With her third film as a writer/director following the culturally curdled “Promising Young Woman” and the insufferable “Saltburn,” Fennell has been very vocal and defiant in arguing the validity of her vision when tackling “Wuthering Heights,” most notably regarding the overt sexualization of historically chaste characters and her insistence on ignoring the racial dynamics at the heart of the story. These creative choices, she says, stem from her own imagination as a fourteen-year-old who once cracked open the classic nineteenth-century novel and was transfixed. For a modern, smut-obsessed, Book-Tok pilled audience, “Wuthering Heights” feels like catnip; a friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-forbidden lovers epic that traverses entire lifetimes and ravages several households along the moors of West Yorkshire, though such simplistic tropes do the novel a massive disservice for its nuance, brutality and gothic charm. Tack onto that basic premise, frequent Emerald Fennell collaborators Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff, a soundtrack by Charlie XCX, along with a few lingering close-ups of skin sweating, tongues searching, and corset ties binding, and you have yourself the making of a perfect Valentine’s Day titillation agent for the masses. Right? Sadly, what could have been a bodice-ripping good time, brimming with yearning, camp and blistering sexual chemistry, is relegated to little more than a flaccid fish left rotting on the table; a casualty of an adaptation made antiseptic by the bizarre instincts of its filmmaker and the film’s insistence on brash anachronism in lieu of inspiration.
“Wuthering Heights” is a novel that few screen adaptations have ever retold in full; with most choosing instead to focus on the first half, which features the torrid emotional bludgeoning of Cathy and Heathcliff. The opening moments of the film feature the sounds of someone groaning lustfully over black before the source is revealed to be a hanging man twitching at the end of his noose, with the children in attendance giddily mocking the erection poking through his trousers. One of those children is a young Cathy Earnshaw, the daughter of a drunken, emotionally volatile man living in a crumbling estate called Wuthering Heights. Her only companion is Nelly, a high-born young girl conceived out of wedlock who is held in Mr. Earnshaw’s employ. The two girls are close, but Nelly is the only one who is willing, nay eager, to tell the often shrill and headstrong Cathy when she is being uncouth. One day, Mr. Earnshaw returns to Wuthering Heights with a boy whom he claims to have rescued from a brutal master, a scared urchin too terrified to speak. Cathy takes the boy in as one would a mangy dog, names him Heathcliff, and proceeds to form him into the pliable, endlessly loyal friend that Nelly could never be. The pair grows together into adulthood, neither fully acting on the love they have always felt for one another. Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), while little more than a servant to Mr. Earnshaw, would venture to the ends of the Earth to make Cathy his bride. Cathy (Margot Robbie) loves Heathcliff in her own flailing way, yet cannot help but be transfixed by the wealthy neighbors who have moved to the house just a few miles from the ruins of Wuthering Heights, the Lintons. Through her own stubborn petulance and admiration of all things glittering, Cathy gains the favor of Mr. Linton (Shazad Latif) and is, in short order, asked to marry him; an offer she accepts with trepidation. In a tearful, private outburst to Nelly, Cathy admits that she could never marry Heathcliff, as it would lower her, though she loves him all the same. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Heathcliff was listening at the door to only the first part of Cathy’s confession and, heartbroken, abandons Wuthering Heights. In short order, Cathy marries Mr. Linton, joins his household, and settles into a begrudging, if not altogether unpleasant, marital bliss in his palatial home alongside his quirky ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver). But the spell is shattered when, after five years, Heathcliff mysteriously returns, having purchased the hollow shell of Wuthering Heights with the destitute Mr. Earnshaw still wallowing within, hoping to return to Cathy the misery that befell him by the betrayal of her heart.
Though marketed as “the greatest love story of all time,” the novel Wuthering Heights is really not intended to be very romantic at all. As written by Brontë, Cathy and Heathcliff are spiteful beings who cackle and demean those around them, so enraptured by their own self-importance that there is little care for the collateral damage and ruined lives their own selfish choices inflict. The entire back half of the novel is, in fact, simply an avalanche of misfortune, cruelty and bile; as people ruined by circumstance, class and the rage of love unrequited are left to rot amid the drafty halls of their ancestral homes. Any semblance of gothic allure is discarded in Fennell’s retelling, replacing period-specific grandeur with dresses made from plastics or latex, presenting Wuthering Heights itself as a obsidian pierced hovel, and discarding the long-suffering passion of the characters for the squelching of spent egg yolks or flesh colored wallapper being fondled.
Still, it’s hard not to see the appeal in a kitchen sink approach to Brontë, dispensing with the aggrandizement and lush beauty that gilds the edges of most adaptations of the romance novels from the period (i.e., Joe Wright’s sumptuous “Pride and Prejudice”) in favor of something that might feel more immediate, unapologetic and bold. That has always been the stated appeal of Fennell’s work, her desire to push past good taste into something more perverse; though more often than not, those instincts land with the solemnity of a wet fart or a slowly draining bathtub, as anyone who dared sit through “Saltburn” can attest. There is never any larger purpose behind her nose snubbing, no desire to see the powerful brought down to size or to present the absurdity of the class systems that govern our world with a critical eye. Fennell, herself born and raised among the aristocracy of England, cannot help but paint those of the lower classes not just as unworthy of consideration, but as outright villains who jealously ruin the placid benevolence of the rich and idiotic. See, for example, Fennell’s treatment of Nelly (Hong Chau). In the novel, Nelly is not a highborn bastard but a maid in Mr. Earnshaw’s house; a constant observer of Cathy’s trials, and later Heathcliff’s, who loves as much as she despises the pair. In the film, Nelly is a plotting, conniving Iago; ever present at the outskirts of Cathy’s despair and even delighting in it. It is Nelly who is the reason that Heathcliff overhears Cathy’s confession, and it is ultimately Nelly’s fault for the film’s catastrophic, deadly conclusion. These were choices made by Fennell to alleviate the burden of choice from Cathy and Heathcliff, to place blame and intention behind the people of least power in the household instead. If adaptation requires intent, this was a concerted, pointed effort by the filmmaker to make a statement; one she has consistently presented time and again in her work, so much so that it cannot be simply seen as a coincidence. In Emerald Fennell’s world, your underlings will always snipe at you, ruin you, make your life a miserable Hell you are undeserving of. It is not your own choices that damn you, merely the vengeful hedonism of the lower classes who are lucky to receive even the scraps that fall from your high table. Your choices are righteous because of your station and can only be undermined by those beneath you if you are not ever vigilant. There are rats in the house that dare presume equality with you, and they will nip pestilence into your heel if given half a chance.
At the very least, one would hope that the central romance would smolder through the screen, but the most taxing sequences in the film are the ones where Robbie and Elordi are attempting to present as sexually frustrated soulmates barreling along a collision course with one another. Instead, we are left with a noble attempt by two excellent actors to draw bodily fluid from stone that ultimately yields chalky, dehydrated residue. Much has been made about Elordi’s casting as a white man intended to play the role of a Romani character, with Fennell again arguing that this was her vision from childhood, and yet the most damning sin of the performance is that he seems lost in all the smoldering. Heathcliff is intended to be dangerous and seductive, enraptured and distant. Meanwhile, Elordi has trouble finding an equal footing with Margot Robbie’s whirling, emotional Cathy. If there is a reason to see the film, it is Robbie’s performance, a near pitch-perfect recreation of the novel’s complicated heroine. In fact, the most effective sequence in the movie comes in the central portion when Heathcliff has abandoned her to the Lintons, leaving Cathy to find some happiness in the gilded cage of her own creation. On Christmas, Cathy returns to Wuthering Heights to find it in disrepair and her father huddling in the cold, driven into a stupor by drink and gambling with his teeth gnarled and twisted into a lecherous grin. Seeing her father in this state, she tries to retain her dignity, yet cannot help but fall into the terror she felt as a little girl, as he guilts her for not being a doting enough daughter to him. In an act of defiance, Cathy flings a stack of coins at his feet and means to leave, but he calls her back, saying that if she wishes him to crawl for his money, then she should at least watch. Robbie’s performance here is devastating as she witnesses her father pitifully crawl across the floor for pennies; this titanic god of her youth brought low by his own poor choices and vanity. Then, unable to bear the shame, she falls to her knees and helps him, crying and apologizing as they pick coins from the trash-strewn floor. Here, Robbie’s superpower as a movie star is in full effect, as is her commitment to Cathy’s chaotic and confused insistence that she can have her Heathcliff and eat it too. If only the rest of the movie could rise to her level, we might have had something here.
“Wuthering Heights” is a spectacle, and quite possibly Emerald Fennell’s best film. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. There is talent in her writing, arresting images in her mind, and still, she can’t seem to get out of her own way in telling stories that attempt to present the virtues of the worst people you’d never hope to meet. Cathy and Heathcliff were always meant for one another, “whatever souls are made of, theirs are the same” after all. Wretched creatures though they are, it’s easy to pity them, as their story is worthy of an adaptation that renders them wholly perceptible in all their contradiction. But, unfortunately for them and us, that’s not the film Emerald Fennell saw when she was fourteen years old.
Gawk at the anachronism, if nothing else, and maybe spin up “Pride and Prejudice” as a palate cleanser when you get home.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Wuthering Heights” is playing at The Broad Theater, Prytania Uptown, and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.