After reading “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontё, I decided that it would be the perfect time to swing by a theater for the first time in years and watch the movie premiere. I bought my overpriced popcorn and headed to my seat, sneaking a couple of glances at the ladies pretending to kiss Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff in the poster.
Director Emerald Fennell was justified in her emphasis that this was an adaptation of the book. It is absolutely nothing like its source.
Fennell’s two hours and 16 minutes “Wuthering Heights” follows the forbidden and erotic romance between Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff across the Yorkshire moors and two estates. Over opening weekend, it raked in about $82 million dollars around the globe.
The set designs were beautifully designed and the weather complemented the intensity of each shot. The music matched the eerie and unsettling vibe of the moors that transported the viewers into the outskirts of England. The outfits were gorgeous and cleverly fashioned to define social class status. Fennell and her team knew exactly how to style a movie with master shots and well-timed gimmicks.
However, it created an environment that was too plastic and flashy to be declared as gothic horror, which the original is categorized as. It became a modern romance that wore the skin of the Victorian era, quite shallowly. Perhaps this was done on purpose.
The acting was decent but lacked emotion when it was called upon. The characters’ reactions were immensely toned down. I must admit, however, Alison Oliver was exceptional playing the “weird girl” as Isabella Linton, but I must note that her character in the novel is the opposite.
The plot is easy to understand, as the dialogue is so straightforward that the viewer never has to think to figure out the motives of each character. Anything not of Brontё’s words is spelled out and loses the eloquence and elegance that Brontё’s characters carried with them.
There is a reason that the movie title was marketed with inverted quotation marks as decorations. Fennell had actually planned this movie since she was 14 years old. Her childhood ideas, such as the whitewashing of Heathcliff, were planned years prior, but she felt she could never do the original justice, so she used the symbols to signal viewers that this is not an accurate adaptation whatsoever.
She was correct, as the movie opens with a suggestive arousal scene (turned out to be a hanging) followed by a montage of sensual scenes. None of this exists in the novel. Fennell decided to focus the movie on Catherine’s sexual awakening in order to spotlight the romance between her and Heathcliff, eliminating any impact that the obsession between the two characters had.
She removed multiple messages that Brontё had embedded into her book with this decision. Racism disappeared. Social class differences were sprinkled but dusted away towards the second half of the movie. Revenge was stomped into the ground, extinguished. All generational trauma is gone because the second half of the book wasn’t even covered, a trend continuously done by most adaptations of “Wuthering Heights.” Fennell killed the children of the characters, starting by murdering Hindley, Catherine’s brother, and merging his abusive self with their kind-hearted father, transforming him into a shell of what Hindley was in the book. It was lazy writing to quickly rid the characters as such. I’m not even sure what the meaning behind the movie was.
The movie was a 14-year-old’s fanfiction of “Wuthering Heights,” full of answered what-ifs, spice, and somehow, comedy. If you were to simply swap the names of the characters and estates, you could not have recognized it as a “Wuthering Heights” adaptation.
If I analyzed the movie without knowing it was based on prior work, the movie would be a delightful and entertaining watch. But comparisons were inevitable, considering it bears the title of a novel I know well. Maybe if Fennell had used different names and claimed that it was inspired by the literary work, it could have avoided the whole controversy that split the internet between book readers and blind watchers as they debated on the rating of the movie.
If deciding on watching the movie, go in with an open mind and low expectations. You’ll enjoy it better and possibly see why it was called “the greatest love story of all time” in the trailers. Unlike me, you may actually cry at the end like the rest of my theater.
