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. 

Rebirth: FRANKENSTEIN

It’s no surprise that Guillermo del Toro would direct an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein. He’s a writer-director obsessed with Gothic fiction and monster movies and fantastical consequences and mythic metaphors and doomed Romanticism and sympathy for the creature. That’s animated his entire filmography so far, from creeping ghosts (Crimson Peak) to Mexican vampires (Cronos) and Spanish legends (Pan’s Labyrinth) to post-World War II American fish-men (The Shape of Water) and creature commandos (Hellboy). He’s always asking: who’s the real monster here? So by the time he’s gotten around to actually doing the real deal story, it feels a little played out. He’s been here before. It doesn’t help that the story of Victor Frankenstein assembling a new creature out of cadaver parts, and then fleeing from accountability for its development or responsibility for his actions, is itself so familiar. It gives the whole production a feeling of dustily reiterating what we’ve already seen countless times over. 

What’s surprising, however, is that Shelley’s original work has lost none of its power through that cultural ubiquity. To read the 19th-century novel itself in the year 2025, even if you’ve read it before, is to encounter with a shock its morbid earnestness and its deeply embedded wrestling with philosophical implications. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be a person? How does one learn? To what does one owe the people in our lives, or the people one creates? Tough, tangled, painfully emotional questions are the stuff of Shelley’s vision, so much more than the cartoon caricature we’ve seen it become in the intervening centuries. Perhaps it is because of that softening that the hard edges of the original still retain the capacity to provoke and unsettle. Perhaps it is also what has maddeningly lead several film critics to confidently, and erroneously, state that Del Toro has been “faithful to the book” despite its clear, and frequent, divergences from it. He nonetheless feels the fate of the monster deeply, and is eager to situate it in his typically lush visual style that drips with affection for his horror inspirations. His movie is every bit as idiosyncratic and driven by passion as his other works. 

At least it’s an adaptation where everyone is on the same page. His cast leans into arch genre exaggerations, shouting exposition as they pace through enormous sets and around opulently designed grotesqueries. Oscar Isaac plays Victor with wild eyes alight with reckless fervor and, in the arctic frame story, fearful regret. Mia Goth does pale, double duty as his mother and an empathetic young woman. Christoph Waltz chomps up some scenes as a broad composite character. But the real star of the show is, as it should be, the creature. Jacob Elordi gives a physical performance that plays off his movement skills and his stretched, lanky physique for maximum melancholy. Del Toro has twisted around the story to give him more interplay with his creator in his halting, post-birth moments, which serves to minimize some of the tension later when its clear everyone involved knows what’s up. No mystery what’s lurking about here. 

It’s part of Del Toro’s literal-minded adaptation, which somehow misses the haunted poetry lurking in the text. That’s especially odd, since he’s hit that tone in prior pictures. Maybe it’s just too explicitly the thing to which his other works allude. This film is constantly larded up with swooping camera movements over expansive fakery, characters plunging off enormous heights and slipping in muck and staring slack-jawed at special effects. No wonder its best moments are the smallest and quietest: a boy looking at a coffin, a monster looking at a blind man, a scientific demonstration with a puppet prototype creature sparking to life. I wish I liked the whole movie as much as I resonated with those moments. Besides, Del Toro is at this point such a jolly appreciator of cinema and ambassador for the art that to say one doesn’t like his new movie feels akin to kicking a puppy. We’re better for having him, even if this effort has, ironically, better parts than a whole.

The Sense of an Ending: OH, CANADA

Paul Schrader’s films have always been political and spiritual and death-haunted. He is the screenwriter of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, among others, some of that master’s most doom-laden and theologically minded. As writer-director on his own, Schrader has given us everything from the incisive work of contentious race-relations and union-building as Blue Collar and the sorrowful ecological and religious angst of First Reformed, his late, fiercely philosophical, intense masterwork. His newest film, Oh, Canada, is especially funereal. Here’s a work from an elderly filmmaker who uses his own closeness to death—the 78-year-old’s recent hospital stays have been well-documented—to make a film perched on that precipice. He’s adapting a Russell Banks novel for the second time in his career, after the powerful alcoholism drama Affliction. This new one stars Richard Gere as a terminally ill filmmaker—a famously draft-dodging documentarian—who agrees to an interview for a movie about his life made by one of his former students (Michael Imperioli). The old man is seated in front of an Interrotron, the camera setup invented by filmmaker Errol Morris to allow the interview subject to comfortably stare straight down the lens by using mirrors to put the questioner’s face directly above it. Gere, looking convincingly frail and confused, inhabits this director as he is asked to tell the story of his career. 

What follows is a slipstream of memories flowing into flashbacks. Schrader plays with time as he plays with color and aspect ratio to visualize a man lost in his own times. Jacob Elordi plays the younger Gere, and then Schrader freely mixes between the two actors in the flashbacks, sometimes Gere playing opposite younger actors. He also has Elordi play scenes against Uma Thurman, who plays two roles, one past and one present, as do some other key cast members. As you age, faces and names blur like this. It makes for a film that’s shot within a sense of an elderly man remembering and inhabiting his memories in the same moment. In this man’s confessions of past failures and foibles, the effect is demystifying—showing life is more complicated and less dramatic than the myths that build up around us—and clarifying. He can’t keep it straight, even as he tries to set the record straight. Most Schrader films pull inward even as they move outward. This one goes only inward—politics and business and war and art all caught in the undertow of a man’s life as his reminiscence finds fleeting connections and lingering divisions. It’s not so much a movie of an old man’s regrets. It’s a movie about an old man’s accumulated hypocrisies and misalignments as he realizes, perhaps too late, that these fragments add up not to a unified whole, but a fragmented one. The result is a fragmented movie, frustrating and yet somehow complete all the same.

Cruel Bummer: SALTBURN

After two films, writer-director Emerald Fennell’s signature appears to be staging social satires with only a glancing understanding of society, ending in twists that call into question what in the world the earlier commentary was supposed to be setting up in the first place. Her Promising Young Woman had such a promising premise—a woman vigilante-style shaming male misbehavior—completely sunk by a choppy execution, complete with following up a take-down of systemic prejudice leaning on said system to solve things in its climactic surprises. What? Now here’s Saltburn, a much better movie on the whole, if only because it has more enjoyable surface pleasures of gleaming craftsmanship and gutsy arch performances. But that doesn’t mean it makes the points it thinks It’s making. I’ll get into that later. The movie comes on strong as sensual and prickly, and self-consciously arty with its grainy squared-off images, elliptical cutting, and woozy pop-heavy soundscapes, as it sets up a clear, Brit-focused, dark and dripping class comedy. It grooves on its cruel streak spectacle for a while, as a lower-class university student (Barry Keoghan) is invited to spend vacation at the palatial estate of a rich classmate (Jacob Elordi). A whole host of quirky, pampered, indulgent characters live there—from an icy mother (Rosamund Pike) to a dotty dad (Richard E. Grant), a teasing sister (Alison Oliver), a sassy quip machine family friend (Carey Mulligan), and a butler (Paul Rhys). We see Keoghan’s pathetic character obviously lusting after their privilege as he worms his way into their lives. Usually this sort of class commentary uses the allure of riches to shame the rich for their obliviousness, and/or the poor for coveting such worldly treasures. Here Fennel flips the script, for a movie that ultimately seems to say, gee, the rich sure are eccentric with their hollow parties and conspicuous consumption, but it is the sneaky underclass for which you have to watch out. There’s a reason why that’s not the thrust of these stories. It’s almost a shame, then, that so many seductive shallow thrills are sent in pursuit of such a flawed premise. You can swoon on those surfaces—the shine of the images, the venal bon mots, the performances of charm and charisma, and physical beauty lit like a perfume commercial. Keoghan, especially, finds new fearless ways to put himself on display—never more than his impressively bare final scene that leaves quite an impression. All that can be fun on a moment by moment basis. But it’s all for naught if the foundation on which these enjoyable details are built is so fundamentally cracked.