There were a number of new releases to come out this weekend, and I was going to go see Crime 101 for what I thought was a 1015 AM showing at the local AMC’s IMAX screening room. Then the movie started a wee bit earlier than I had thought it would. I heard what sounded like someone having sex as credits rolled. I knew the movie was said to be an adult crime drama, so that could be a sign that this isn’t for kids. Then I saw the named “Emerald Fennell” flash by and knew this wasn’t Crime 101! This was the new Wuthering Heights! The new release I was least interested in seeing! Oh, I figured I might go see it anyway, but that wasn’t what I came to see. I stepped outside for a minute and saw that I was in the right theater. Then it hit me: my movie was at 10:15 PM, not AM.
I opted to see Wuthering Heights anyway. I mean, I was already there.
In the crumbling, ancestral home of the Earnshaws, Wuthering Heights, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) is a deep-in-debt drunk with a gambling problem, but one day on a whim, he brings home a nameless young boy that his headstrong, somewhat snobby daughter Cathy named “Heathcliff” after her dead brother. The two grow up together as the closest of companions and, as adults, are very much in love. Cathy (Margot Robbie) is seeing their poverty as a crushing weight even as she pines for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). Heathcliff in turn silently loves Cathy, even as he works as a servant in Mr. Earnshaw’s house and takes the older man’s abuse. When the new money Lintons move into a large house on the other side of the moor. Cathy eventually introduces herself, catching the eye of Edgar (Shazad Latif), likewise befriending Edgar’s ward Isabella (Alison Oliver). When Cathy decides to marry Edgar, her longtime maid Nelly (Hong Chau) notes Heathcliff overhears part of Cathy’s anguish as she tries to decide between Edgar and Heathcliff. Circumstances led Cathy to marry Edgar.
However, years later, Heathcliff returns to Cathy’s life as a wealthy man and the new owner of Wuthering Heights. From here, the love of Cathy and Heathcliff, two people who are very much opposite sides of the same coin, intertwine, where Cathy is married to a perfectly fine man that she just does not love while Heathcliff pines for Cathy in their decrepit childhood home. The story of Wuthering Heights is a tragic one, but there’s a real chemistry here between these two characters. Will they work something out this time?
For the record, I have never been much of a fan of Wuthering Heights. I read the novel at one point, thinking it would be like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, but Charlotte’s sister Emily’s novel is basically the anti-Jane Eyre. I did see the 1939 movie version with Lawrence Olivier when I went through the AFI’s Top 100 movie list, and it was fine. The problem can best be summed up by a friend who described the novel as “two horrible people who deserve each other.” Heathcliff, in the novel, wants revenge against the Lintons who, arguably, didn’t do anything to him. Isabella, for certain, is innocent, and Edgar’s worst crime as, in the original version, he was maybe rude to Heathcliff when they were both children and then he married Cathy. Cathy herself isn’t much better, but she also dies early in the book. Factor in as well that Nelly the maid narrates the whole story, and she’s a bit judgmental, and you’re basically left with a guy who is angry at a lot of people who don’t deserve what he does to them and a maid who may not even be the most reliable of narrators.
See, this movie makes some changes to the characters, making the women in particular more well-rounded. Heathcliff’s motives are actually more understandable here as is his target. Nelly, meanwhile, is more three-dimensional as a character herself, one who does what she does, in part, because of how Cathy treats her. Cathy may be more of the villain, but she’s more of a snob than anything else, someone who made a decision that broke her heart and never stopped regretting it. I found this interpretation much better. Heck, I particularly liked how the movie played Isabella. Factor in as well the more surrealistic look of the movie, where Wuthering Heights and the Linton mansion don’t look like real places while being on the opposite ends of the financial spectrum. Besides, this version probably has more bondage sex or people sucking on each others’ fingers than any other version of the story, so let’s just say that Fennell’s script isn’t the most faithful of adaptations, and I appreciate the movie more as a result.
Grade: A-
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