Doddering Heights
(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail!)
Wouldn't condemn Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" for taking liberties with Emily Bronte, but would condemn the film for making such weak tea out of her novel.
Agreed the Byronic protagonist should be darkskinned-- though every Heathcliff in most every adaptation has been white (Olivier, Fiennes); agreed taking out Hindley is a grievous wound (combining the man who adopts Heathcliff with the man who most hates Heathcliff makes for a veddy confusing character); agreed cutting out the novel's second half truncates much of the story's power (though most every version including the classic 1939 William Wyler adaptation does just that).
What I find unacceptable is the softening of the main characters. Emily's Catherine to put it bluntly is a bitch, Emily's Heathcliff a sonfabitch, and their relationship has a strong whiff of incest about it (implied but never stated that Heathcliff is likely Mr. Earnshaw's bastard child-- and Catherine likely his half-sister). I'd even object to Fennell's turning Nelly (Hong Chau) into an underhanded villain, tho there are hints here and there-- the crucial scene in the novel when Heathcliff eavesdrops (why didn't Nelly warn Catherine?) comes to mind. I've heard criticism that the whole course of the novel depended on such a little thing-- a man listening and leaving at just the right moment-- but truth of the matter is anything could have split the two up: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, a trivial spat. Catherine and Heathcliff are what you'd call 'compelling'-- characters you'd love to read about in a gothic novel but hell to actually live with day to day. They're so stubborn they'd find the slightest excuse to fight; they're their own worst enemies. Shifting the blame on Nelly as Fennell does absolves them of what they've done to each other, lessens the tragedy of their relationship.
As for the sex-- two ways to think about it: either they've been fucking every chance they get, under a bed, in a barn, round a corner behind a door, or they haven't. Funny effect of a 19th century gothic, in particular Emily's type of gothic: you never see sex mentioned but it seeps between every line like blood through a linen shirt, and if you have a particularly overactive imagination (like to think I give mine the occasional workout) you'll imagine all kinds of scenarios. To be fair Fennell comes up with two satisfying ones-- one where Catherine and Heathcliff hide up in the barn attic, one where Nelly visits Heathcliff and Isabella (Alison Oliver, physically unappealing till she marries, then a startling delight).
If they haven't-- why that's even hotter. Two lovers aching for each other who haven't even made out, much less done some heavy petting? Can you imagine the epic edging involved, the blueness of Heathcliff's balls? Emily I submit was actually trying to describe a more than merely physical connection: Heathcliff and Catherine spent hours with each other as youths, presumably the way Emily and sisters Charlotte and Anne spent hours with brother Branwell, creating kingdoms-- worlds-- of their own.
So when Fennell offers all those vigorously staged and shot onscreen sex scenes as her substitution for a lifetime's worth of wild windswept fantasies-- well let's just say all that muscular exertion falls a little flat.
Won't even talk about the dropped second half that outlines both Heathcliff's generation-spanning vengeance and the next generation's ability not just to suffer but endure and, improbably, thrive under that suffering. Yes Heath and Cath are avatars of willful fire but that second half helps complicate our view of Heathcliff-- suddenly he's a crumbling man seeing the world grow past his control, and there's something pathetic-- sad even-- about his decline.
That's my problem with the Fennell adaptation. Are there better? I can cite three-- four if you include the Olivier (who makes for an unruly Heathcliff, tho I remember disliking Merle Oberon's Cathy, and the William Wyler style of tastefully rendered squalor).
Luis Bunuel's Abismos de Pasion (1954) shifts the setting from Yorkshire to Mexico and takes a chainsaw to the novel, lopping off the lovers' childhood (the film starts when Heathcliff comes back a rich man), ending shortly after Catherine's passing (the same tactic Fennell and Wyler adopt). Working on a shoestring budget he tells the story with heroic simplicity, as straight as only a true pervert can (think David Lynch with The Straight Story), the emotions simmering under a thin parchment of respectability, the wind howling past tortured leafless trees in the high chaparral. No we don't get much background (why did Alejandro (Heathcliff) leave? Why does he hate Eduardo (Edgar) and Ricardo (Hindley) so much?) but Bunuel is all about smolder and atmosphere and Alejandro (Jorge Mistral) has a killer glare that burns holes on the screen. With a climax played to the strains of Wagner's "Liebestod" so down and dirty and abrupt it leaves you a little breathless.
If you want the book the whole book and nothing but try Yoshishige Yoshida's Arashi Ga Oka (1988) set on the windswept slopes of a volcano, telling the entire story across three generation in a relatively compact 140 minutes. Yoshida's version is inspired by Noh acting-- the characters strut or slink as if on a minimalist stage-- and is contemplative in tone, taking its time (despite the massive amount of story involved) to accumulate detail till Yoshida's version of Emily's elaborate narrative unrolls in all its ungainly glory.
I talked about less being more when it comes to sex; I lied-- Yoshida stages a scene where Kinu (the Catherine figure, played by Yuko Tanaka) coils around Onimaru (the Heathcliff figure, played by Yusaku Matsuda) like a serpent and you're thinking Ms. Fennell should have sat down and taken notes. And for all its faithfulness the film is hardly stuffy-- Onimaru is a brute, his quest to possess Kinu involving everything from bloodspurting violence to gravedigging to suggestions of necrophilia (and worse). No ghosts-- Yoshida doesn't go for anything so cheap-- but the film definitely gives you the feeling that the murdered do haunt their murderers. Can't really take credit for finding this one; Mr. Bilge Ebiri put it on top of his Vulture list of best adaptations of the book.
Helps that my personal favorite also happens to be a great comedy, Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story-- okay hear me out: Gerry (Claudette Colbert) flees her penniless husband/lover Tom (Joel McCrea) to marry multimillionaire John D Hackensacker lll (Rudy Vallee) and obtain the $99,000 needed for one of Tom's inventions. When Tom shows up at Hackensacker's mansion to stop the wedding Gerry passes him off as her brother Captain McGlue; meantime McGlue catches the eye of Hackensacker's sister Princess Centimillia a.k.a. Maud (Mary Astor), who plots to make him her fourth husband.
A pair of siblings, the suggestion of incest (in 1942 Hollywood!), the scheming, the overt amorality-- the film is basically Wuthering Heights with palm trees and more jokes. Joel McCrea makes a fine Heathcliff with his huge shoulders, stiff bearing, and tendency to sock any man who looks at his wife in the jaw; Claudette Colbert is the perfect chaos demon with her wide "who me?" eyes and adulterously pursed lips. The film ends abruptly with an unlikely twist and too-convenient reveal, too convenient, that is, unless you factor in the zany chase that opens the picture with characters conveniently forgotten till the plot suddenly drags them in, and a final shot that suggests a never-ending circular chase that has only paused to allow for end credits-- and suddenly you're reminded of Emily Bronte's brooding vision of souls seeking and repelling each other, their forebears and siblings and descendants caught in their wake, in a never-ending circular chase of desire and destruction. Am I nuts? Maybe but so's the book and so, in my book, is this film
2.19.26
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