Moor Drama: "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"

In Charlotte Brontë’s preface to her sister Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights, she wrote that it was “hewn in a wild workshop…” Nearly 200 years later, that wild workshop’s product continues to reveal itself as an unexpected book of lurid details and quicksilver emotional turns. It has joltingly vivid imagery—a ghostly hand reaching through a window, a child dropped from a staircase, a dog bite. These disquieting visuals lead us through the characters’ tempestuous melodramas. In twined temptations of love and revenge these drives are twisted and gnarled into generational trauma. It’s a story of abusive behavior and addiction, with ideas of race and class and gender that are both of the time and astonishingly contemporary. And it is told with prose that is both nestled with first-person narratives-within-narratives in traditional Romantic 19th century style, and swirled with propulsive, jangled punctuation and pulsing interpersonal rifts. Is it a story of damaged people eroding the quality of life for everyone around them? Is it a stormy tale of endless yearning on the windswept moors? Isn’t it all of the above? The book’s dark power resonates for its closed-loop cycle of dysfunction. 

The first half of the story gives us the younger years of Cathy and her father’s troubled ward Heathcliff. They are drawn to each other and doomed to fall apart. The story grows only more thorny and layered in the second half of Brontë’s work, which carries the conflicts to a second generation. Most screen adaptations, pursuing simplicity, clarity, and rounder edges, don’t bother with that part. It’s become, in most filmmaker’s eyes, a story of a big dark house and missed connections, ghostly desire and thwarted happiness. William Wyler’s 1939 film was glossy black and white melodrama with a stentorian mood and simmering subterranean cruelty. Andrea Arnold’s 2012 version was intimate, quivering, raw and subtextual. It takes Emerald Fennell, however, to say: what if it’s a Jane Austen story if Jane Austen was a Goth girl? Not even Kate Bush pushed it that far. Fennell’s adaptation is titled self-consciously with quotation marks included, making clear that it’s simply a “Wuthering Heights,” not the definitive Wuthering Heights. That sense of looseness helps set the mood. 

The movie’s shot in striking filmic theatricality, with realistic windy moors contrasted with ostentatiously designed sets for a crumbling Gothic manor and its neighboring dollhouse estate. At the former lives Cathy (Margot Robbie) who clearly has quasi-incestuous desires for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). He’s a scruffy low-class orphan who was brought into their house as a boy. He took the brunt of her cruel father’s beatings. That bonded them. Now they’re each well into marriageable age—and supposedly around the same age despite the actors being, and looking, seven years apart. The movie mainly revolves around their frisson of taboo chemistry, crossing class boundaries and familial ties. They’re each quick-tempered and difficult, and she loves to boss him around. He’s playmate, pet, and servant. For his part, he just wants her. That’s thwarted when rich new neighbors move in and she tosses Heathcliff aside for a potential wealthy beau. This sets off the stormy bad feelings that swallow up the rest of the movie. This is the only through line it's interested in exploring, and collapses a small, claustrophobic dynamic into its intricately designed grotesques making subtext text—enormous piles of empty bottles to denote a character’s alcoholism, say.

The film’s desire to be an edgy romantic tragedy somehow avoids letting its characters expand beyond the programmatic places for them. It’s a movie that closes down ambiguities in its main characters while opening up a sense of vagueness in its supporting players. (The likes of Hong Chau and Alison Oliver are making fascinating choices in the margins, without ever being allowed to come into focus as fully rounded figures.) Fennell adjusts the character dynamics to fit her usual feel-bad vision of the world, without even a ghostly chance for reconnection. Here people make permanent choices to chase revenge and lust and are left only worse off for it. She wants to shock and provoke with fluids and teasingly naughty sexual tensions. It’s of a piece with her clumsy filmography to date. Her nasty Promising Young Woman’s sense of righteous anger is undone by its paradoxically Pollyannaish misanthropy. Her Saltburn is a wicked thriller about how the frivolous bourgeoisie needs to watch out for scheming proletariat interlopers. That seemed a flaw, and deeply unfair, but at least it feels like an honest personal statement. She does it again here, turning the under-class into threats. Her films are increasingly competent in terms of style and design, but have remained stubbornly simplistic in their approach to humanity. 

Thus this “Wuthering Heights” loves a heightened style. It swoons with original Charlie XCX songs—a pulsating sonic highlight to pump up the montage—and gaudy fabrics, lovingly photographed garish backdrops and snow and skies so false that it feels like vibrant matte paintings and soap flakes. It wants to be a tempestuous doomed romance in elaborately appointed lush tableau. And the sheer wall-to-wall design of it all sells quite a bit of its excesses. Even so, the ending is undone by its moment-to-moment sensations failure to craft real character and not just signifying and posing. Still, I’d rather see a marvelous failure than a tepid success. What’s most astonishing is how Brontë’s shock effects still seem so elusive on screen, and even a would-be provocateur like Fennell can’t locate them. Its interest in being an aesthetic object leads it to be pretty compelling moment to moment, like discussing a complicated book with a reductive, but passionate, young reader encountering them afresh. But it also slowly drifts away from a coherent point, finally jamming its way to an ill-fitting over-the-top romantic tragedy conclusion given the mixed messages leading up to it. I was continually impressed with it as a work of craft, less impressed as a work of acting, and least impressed as a feat of writing and directing. Fennell’s wild workshop, though opulently stocked with images, continues to produce muddled results.