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. 

Triple Threat: KINDS OF KINDNESS

“Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused”
— Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

“This were kindness?”
— The Merchant of Venice (1.3.154)

For anyone worried that Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos was drifting to the mainstream with his awards feted, and surprise box office hits, The Favourite and Poor Things, here’s Kinds of Kindness to most fully expose that bleeding heart of darkness within his works. Not that those other films aren’t wild with vulgarity and explicitness, too, but they were packaged in aesthetically pleasing historical intrigue or flights of fancy, respectively. Kindness is colder, slower, less immediately narratively legible, and without even the slightest hint of appealing character motives. That’s what makes it so compelling, too. One watches it trying to figure it out, and it's structured to keep slipping away. It’s fitting that it begins by blasting the iconic driving synths of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” as the movie is about people used and abused, in darkly comedic and deadpan absurd stories in which everyone is looking for something, and in which reality seems to take on the logic of an inscrutable dream. Lanthimos pins down his characters in clinically precise widescreen frames, and then spins out the surreal plot turns, scripted with his Killing of a Sacred Deer co-writer Efthimis Filippou. He does so with an unblinking, mannered realism, dialing back the style and coaxing underplayed reactions just when the stories are aching for excess.

As the characters wriggle their ways through the emotional and physical pain of their plots, the movie becomes a caustic acid bath of cynicism, watching toxic people give into base impulses, and work their wicked ways. The film is made up of three short films, each nearly an hour long and starring the same ensemble. Each tale would undoubtedly test the patience at feature length, each take a sick joke inside a sick joke that starts strange, grows even stranger, and then ends on its bleakest, gnarliest punchline. The first finds a businessman (Jesse Plemons) totally controlled by his boss (Willem Dafoe) and the old man’s mistresses (Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley), down to the food he eats and whether or not his wife (Hong Chau) will get pregnant. When he finds himself doubting his commitment to his latest grotesque task, his life instantly changes for the worse. The second story finds Plemons as a police officer whose wife (Stone) has been missing at sea. It’s odd enough that in his grief he invites their friends (Qualley and Mamoudou Athie) over to watch their sex tape; odder still is how he reacts when his wife is eventually discovered. Lastly, we find Stone and Plemons looking for a Chosen One at the behest of a cult leader (Dafoe) and his wife (Chau). It becomes a sort of desperate ritual as it goes on.

In each story, the cast is so good at inhabiting these extreme situations of sex and violence with shrugging acceptance that the bubbling surreality is played out quite naturally—subtext and text dancing with extreme literalness, down to the black-and-white flashes of dreams and visions that mingle with their mindsets. These characters are constantly doing acts of a selfish sort of kindness, casually blowing up lives, behaving as dangers to themselves and others. If this were kindness, who needs cruelty? Here’s a movie with a pretty low opinion of human behavior that’s as darkly upsetting as it is grimly funny, in a preposterous string of circumstances held in the grip of skilled filmmakers making each moment count. Lanthimos using the same faces in new roles uses each switch of the narrative to recombine them into dynamics of freedom and control, power and submission, responsibility and individualism. These characters keeps slamming into illusions they’ve created to make sense of lives spiraling out of control—often of their own doing. The bruising absurdism of each accumulates into the sickest joke of all: sometimes the only kindness is to give into the absurdity of your circumstances and hope for the best.

As an aside—how wild is it to think back to 2010, when Stone’s Easy A was a satisfying comedy that confirmed her a star and Lanthimos’ nasty, explicit Dogtooth got a surprise Academy Award nomination for foreign-language film. Imagine telling us moviegoers back then that those two would bring out the best in each other.

Pride (Month) and Prejudice: FIRE ISLAND

It might seem like director Andrew Ahn’s style is easy until you remember how hard most other indie dramatists work to achieve much less effect. Ahn specializes in small dramas so effortlessly pulled off, so quietly accomplished and casually observant, that they never draw attention to anything but how their characters lives come to life before our eyes. It’s this sensitivity of his sensibility that surfaces small details of desire and frustration, insecurities and connection, as characters grapple with what it means to be themselves, and how to share that with others. His 2016 debut Spa Night is about a young, closeted Korean-American man (Joe Seo) who, in the wake of his parents’ restaurant going out of business, takes a job at a bath house. Ahn’s 2020 feature Driveways finds a woman (Hong Chau) cleaning out her late sister’s house, while her precocious young son strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly veteran next door (Brian Dennehy, powerfully understated in his final performance). In other hands, these premises could be obvious, played for cloying sentiment and clumsy messages. Ahn, though, sees these characters as people, not types, and the stories as rich with specific details of these particular circumstances. Informed by this earnest interiority, his deceptively simple visual style breathes with close-ups and insert shorts that bring his character’s perspectives and perceptions into clear focus.

What a treat, then, that he’s brought this sensibility to the warm Pride Month confection that is Fire Island. It’s a frank and bubbly gay romantic comedy plunked down on the eponymous beachfront off the coast of Long Island, and in the specifics of gay life in contemporary America. The movie begins with a big tip of the hat to Jane Austen, with a voice-over quoting the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Well, our narrator admits, not every man wants a wife. And so he’s off with his friends to spend a summer week on Fire Island, which has a long history of attracting gay men looking to have a good, uninhibited time this time of year. Once there, the movie becomes a modern riff on Austen, with its sparkling social comedy and darting social commentary. There’s even some Bach and Vivaldi to the score sprinkled in the soundtrack of dance pop.

The result is a charming movie about relationships and class, and the way the two interact in a romantic context. Our leads’ friend group is made up of scrappy working-class New Yorkers staying at a cozy little house owned by their older lesbian den mother (Margaret Cho). While there, they fall into potential romantic entanglements with rich Los Angeles guys staying in a mansion on the beach. Along the way, plenty of low-key, sharply drawn conversations about taste and race, sex and intimacy, and social media and social status are explored, teased out in a variety of contexts as characters mix it up in parties, dances, dinners, karaoke, and taxi boats. The party doesn’t stop, but bubbles along as people try to find themselves, and how to best relate to those around them, amidst the noise.


Ahn balances the dictates of a fizzy genre like the rom-com with his more realistic, character-centric approach. Luckily writer and star Joel Kim Booster gives the movie the material that Ahn’s style needs to shoot it like one of his dramas, an eye for the detail of a stolen glance, a sunset, a miscommunication. It gives real emotional heft to the usual rom-com tropes. Booster’s character is a fine Lizzie Bennett type, resolutely disinterested in a frosty L.A. Darcy (Conrad Ricamora), and more concerned with getting his shy and sweet best friend (Bowen Yang) a hookup with the Angeleno’s pal (James Scully). This sets in motion the whirling entanglements of a small town vacation, as the two friend groups keep crossing paths. There’s smartly underplayed tensions—funny micro-aggressions or petty annoyances—and barely-shy-of-sentimental romantic possibilities. A few choice subplots are developed just enough to color in supporting players’ ups and downs, too. And all along Booster’s screenplay sparkles and snaps with witty dialogue and warmly-developed characterization. 



It gets laughs by sliding past punchlines in a charmingly natural way, heightened without feeling overly performative. It is ever-so-slightly broad comedy springing forth from a relaxed and raunchy feel of reality. Here’s a movie that loves its characters and its world, even as it lets them be real, flawed, funny figures, and makes some perceptive drama from ideas about race, money, body image, and more. Still, this isn’t a message movie, and this isn’t an indifferently photographed comedy. It has a perspective, a casually, beautifully, observational visual sensibility, and it has a tight structure that drifts on its modern Austen vibes to celebrate its characters’ chances to let obstacles fall to the wayside as love finds a way.