The poster for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, which has been plastered seemingly everywhere, is meant to evoke the passionate embraces and ripped bodices on the cover of a Harlequin paperback. I’ve never read one of those — even though they, too, were ubiquitous for a time — but I’ll bet their characters had more complex inner lives than the ones in Fennell’s film.
I also haven’t read the beloved Emily Brontë novel that inspired the movie, but I understand it’s a thorny, multigenerational epic of cruelty, class, decay and fickle people wielding their desires and ambitions like daggers. It is, of course, about Cathy and Heathcliff, the social climber and the stable boy who are drawn to one another through shifting fortunes, marriages of convenience, revenge, disease and death.
This new adaptation, which Fennell has generously described as a reinterpretation, plays like someone’s hazy memories of a book they haven’t read in years.
The casting of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi sparked discourse before the film was even shot, but they’re excellent actors and so you might assume they could bring any character to life. But neither of them is particularly impressive here, and Robbie is miscast: She’s playing Cathy not because she’s right for the role but because she’s a bankable star, and she’s unconvincing in early scenes where she’s supposed to be a sullen, annoying teenager. She and Elordi don’t have much chemistry — romantic, sexual, volatile or otherwise — which is a problem in a story where the relationships should be charged with unrestrained passion and morbid inevitability.
Fennell draws a razor-thin line between sex and death, from the film’s witty opening scene of a lascivious crowd at a public hanging to its many romantic gestures beside freshly dug graves. Slaughterhouses, horse stables, muddy fields — all become playgrounds for kink and bondage. Fennell may have been inspired by Ken Russell’s hedonistic visions of Victorian England, but unlike Russell, her alleged transgressions come across as eye-rolling provocations. She likes to rile up the audience with taboos, but they don’t add up to anything; she drops them and runs away.
Fennell’s strongest suit is her eye, and the set decoration better expresses the characters’ emotions than the screenplay. There’s a fireplace mantle that resembles interlocking, groping hands, and Cathy locks herself in a room where the walls resemble human flesh.
There’s a temptation, then, to consider Wuthering Heights on a purely visual, visceral level, and with the electronic Charli XCX songs swirling on the soundtrack, it often feels like one long music video. And that approach could work: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette used a pop sensibility to explore historical repression and gender roles, but that movie also had a beating heart behind its decor and needle drops. Here, Heathcliff and Cathy keep talking about their feelings, but we don’t understand them and we certainly don’t feel them.
Back to the poster of Wuthering Heights. The title is contained within quotation marks, and the whole movie feels like it’s in quotes. It’s hard to say whether it’s meant as an ironic deconstruction of Brontë’s work, as a thumb in the eye to literary purists, or as romantic fan-fiction that deliberately disregards the original text. Regardless, it’s mostly unbearable and beautifully hollow, and so we’re left to wander those wild and windy moors just like poor, doomed Cathy.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.