Wuthering Heights
I have not read any full-length reviews of the new Wuthering Heights adaptation. However I did see a number of responses on social media that were, shall we say, somewhat acerbic in tone. I therefore entered the movie theater (with all of five other people) with...well, not optimism, to be frank, but a bit of trepidation. "It can't be that appalling," I told myself.
Reader, it indeed could be that appalling.
Now, look: I occasionally teach classes on adaptation (one on Sherlock Holmes, another on Jane Eyre), and so I don't judge adaptations on fidelity alone. And creative appropriations of original works can be extraordinarily interesting in their own right. Yet both adaptation and appropriation succeed or fail on their engagement with the original--exploiting the potential of the shift to a new medium or even genre; exploring a work's key elements from a historical distance; moving a secondary character to the front; etc. (For example, the famous 1940s Picture of Dorian Gray--the one that shifts to technicolor for Ivan Albright's painting--cleverly brings out a point that students often miss in the novel, which is that Dorian is the only character for whom the painting makes any sense. Far from being a legible confession, to anyone else the painting is not even recognizably Dorian.) As even a loose reworking of Wuthering Heights, this film simply does not say much of anything about the novel. It does not even say much of anything about previous adaptations, even though its elimination of Generation Two is itself a conventional choice, as is its reading of Heathcliff's and Cathy's relationship as a fairly mundane romance.
In the interest of fairness, I will admit that the film does pick up on the role of windows in the novel--Heathcliff and Cathy watch each other through windows, Heathcliff comes into Isabella's bedroom through a window, Heathcliff breaks a window in anger, Cathy does the multiple last name thing on her bedroom window, and so on. Turning Nelly Dean into the villain in Heathcliff's and Cathy's relationship, while stretching a critical point, does at least draw on an interpretive tradition that sees some holes in her unreliable narration when it comes to her agency, as well as her interest in Heathcliff (and it's worth noting that in the novel, she inadvertently gives Heathcliff the idea for his revenge). By the same token, Nelly is correctly represented as a near-contemporary of Heathcliff and Cathy, not considerably their senior.
My fairness has now exhausted itself. It's not that the film has no ideas; it just drops them in and drops them out again. Hareton's illiteracy, for example, is given to Heathcliff, but Heathcliff never learns to read or write (not true in the novel), and is bizarrely reduced to demanding that Isabella write fictions about how terrible her life with him is in order to get Cathy to come visit. When Cathy II teaches Hareton to read, the characters enter into a relationship of care very different from Heathcliff dictating Linton Heathcliff's love letters. In the film, Heathcliff refuses to learn to read (perhaps not surprisingly, as Cathy is an incompetent teacher), and then...the point never comes back until the very end, when Isabella sneers at him in the midst of their (completely unbelievable) sadomasochistic, er, thingy that they have going on. (No, I don't know why they have a sadomasochistic, er, thingy going on either.) Similarly, Heathcliff buys Wuthering Heights from Earnshaw, but the film's Earnshaw, doing double duty for Hindley, doesn't need to be tricked out of it. It's not even clear that there's a revenge motive in play, let alone that Earnshaw cares all that much. Meanwhile, there actually are hints that the film meant to do something meaningful with the casting for Nelly and Edgar Linton, given Earnshaw's very specific snobbishness in relation to the two of them (this Nelly is the illegitimate daughter of a lord, and Edgar Linton is nouveau riche), but...it does not do that? What is the point?
What is the point, indeed. Despite the frequently bizarre set and costume designs--adult Cathy never foregoes a chance to show off her decolletage, including in the middle of winter--the film fails to be surreal, let alone Gothic. No, lots of fog and weird rock formations are not sufficient unto the day. There's some attempt at color painting with Cathy's endless red and white costumes (blood! passion! get it?) and, perhaps more successfully, the candy-colored Thrushcross Grange, but the stylization never truly comes off. There is a lot of sex, adulterous and otherwise, frequently in some extraordinarily stupid places. ("Yes, we can get it on in my bedroom, which is right across from Edgar's. Of course, sex in a carriage. No, I didn't have to explain anything to the coachman. Sex on the grounds is an excellent idea.") Oh, and the sex equals death, of course, given the fakeout introduction (where the apparently orgasmic sounds we hear are actually a man dying on the gallows, which...arouses...several members of the public). Given how relentlessly secular the film is, aside from the unexplained presence of a nun in full habit, it's not surprising that there's no real sense of forces at work beyond the material. Heathcliff and Cathy are not larger than life in their selfishness; in fact, this Heathcliff is a rather boring non-entity, lacking the original's malevolent energy. His manipulation of Isabella is the closest he gets to evil--not surprising, given that most of the evil manifests during his revenge plot--but here, she seems to be enjoying herself and has to be forcibly dragged away in the rain. (Characters do get rained on a lot.) Spoiler: the cute dog remains unhanged. You can't see either Heathcliff or Cathy bothering to come back from the grave.
