I.

Dismal reviews notwithstanding, I hoped that “Wuthering Heights”—writer-director Emerald Fennell’s cinematic adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic novel—would at least be a deliciously enjoyable bodice-ripper. The trailer promised hunky, saturnine Jacob Elordi in his exquisitely tailored black frock-coat lustily bending over a billowing-gowned Margot Robbie, who swoons and melts in the throes of tragic passion. Oh, the desperate sprints across the Yorkshire moors to those secret trysts! The howling wind and the lashing rain! The yearning quasi-folk electropop of Charli xcx in the background (Charli may be forever tainted by her association with the hapless Kamala Harris, but she sure can sing). “Bring it on!” I thought. “Who cares that this two-hour-plus extravaganza obviously bears no resemblance to Brontë’s book? Isn’t that why Fennell enclosed the title of her movie in distancing quotation marks?” At the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in Yorkshire last September, Fennell declared, “I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it [aged fourteen], which means that it’s an emotional response to something. It’s, like, primal, sexual.” She cast the sloe-eyed 6’5” Elordi as Heathcliff because, she said, he looked just like the illustration on the cover of the edition she read as a young girl.

Unfortunately, the movie does not deliver on the bodice-ripping deliciousness. Fennell evidently decided that, since Cathy and Heathcliff never consummate their affair in Brontë’s Victorian novel, she needed to remedy that deficiency by stuffing her film with a lot of softcore sex and innuendo (a hanged man with a massive erection, for example). So, Heathcliff and Cathy go at it incessantly. And since Cathy has married her rich neighbour, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), for his money, the coupling takes place in an array of furtive and impromptu venues: inside a carriage, on a tabletop, but usually in the great outdoors.

It’s all R-rated sex and the characters keep their clothes on (their passion is too urgent for undressing), but Fennell makes up for that by having Heathcliff do quite a bit of licking—of Cathy’s face mostly, but also of her fingers after he catches her masturbating on the moors (which have undoubtedly seen worse over the millennia). It also rains constantly, drenching the lovers mid-coitus—another “primal” touch added by Fennell. The results are often risible. I enjoyed a good laugh when Heathcliff and Cathy sneak up to a hayloft and peep through the floorboards at two lusty young servants engaging in a bit of BDSM with the horse tack. And a reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter remarked that a shot of a shirtless, sweating Heathcliff stacking hay bales was “so close to gay farmer porn I giggled.” Just in case we haven’t got the idea, Fennel lays the sexual symbolism on extra thick during a scene in which Cathy cracks raw eggs onto Heathcliff’s bedsheets, and another in which we watch Cathy knead wet dough in slow-motion like she’s giving an erotic massage.

But for most of the film’s running time, I was bored. After about an hour, I began to wonder when, how, and if all of this was going to end. Part of the problem is that for all their strenuous exertions, there’s no chemistry between Elordi and Robbie at all. Elordi is good-looking and swarthy enough, but he doesn’t have the hammy charisma of, say, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation. It doesn’t help that, for the first third of Fennell’s movie before he makes his fortune and cleans himself up into Hot Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff resembles a stringy-haired, bushy-bearded hobo (like Charles Manson, but a lot taller). Whenever he kissed Margot Robbie, much less licked her fingers, I recoiled on her behalf.

And Margot Robbie is comically miscast as Cathy. She’s a rare blonde bombshell who can also act, and she’s a standout in spunky, high-spirited roles like Mrs Wolf of Wall Street, Tonya Harding, Sharon Tate, and Barbie. But she can’t do tragic period heroines well. Furthermore, Robbie was 34 when “Wuthering Heights” was shot, which is much too old to play the part of Cathy. In the novel, Cathy develops her crush on Heathcliff when she is fifteen, and dies aged just nineteen. This is not necessarily fatal to the adaptation—Merle Oberon was 27 when the Wyler version was shot—except that Robbie had just given birth to her son when filming began, and her postpartum-thickened waistline and maternal pheromones make it hard to take her moor-romping seriously.

Nor is Robbie well-served by the movie’s much-praised but actually ugly and unflattering costumes—the handiwork of Jacqueline Durran (who also designed the costumes for Barbie). Nearly every one of Robbie’s frocks features a tight-waisted bodice that makes her look like an opera coloratura instead of a Yorkshire ingenue, and a neckline (if it can be called that) cut to emphasise her heaving cleavage (I don’t know whether it was push-up bras or nursing, but Robbie isn’t that busty). On the Wuthering Heights farm, she sports a revealing Oktoberfest dirndl outfit that looks like it was copied from the St. Pauli Girl label. Once she marries into the conspicuously consuming Lintons, there must be a hundred different costume changes. But it’s all more of the same, except with even bigger puffed sleeves and skirts so voluminous that when Robbie is running across the moors in long shot, she looks like a bowling ball. A crimson bowling ball specifically, since Durran apparently decided that Cathy’s sensuality required her to almost always be dressed in red. Red garments with their bloody connotations seem to be de rigueur these days for the tempestuous heroines of female-directed movies (cf. Hamnet). 

There is no character development in Fennell’s film because there are hardly any characters. Fennell has ruthlessly stripped away most of the ones that Brontë created, including an entire second generation of Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s offspring (not by each other). She’s by no means the first Wuthering Heights adapter to lop off the novel’s second half; William Wyler did the same, as did many of those who followed him. After all, it’s not easy to make a movie version of a book work when the A-list female protagonist dies long before the story is over. But in Fennell’s version, the amputation means there’s hardly any story left at all.

One of the key characters she eliminates is Cathy’s older brother, Hindley. In Brontë’s novel and in Fennell’s movie, Heathcliff is a foundling of possible gypsy origin, picked off the streets by Cathy’s father, Mr. Earnshaw, during a trip to Liverpool. In the book, old man Earnshaw dotes on and spoils the sullen new family addition (some literary scholars have wondered whether Brontë meant him to be his illegitimate son). This rankles Hindley, Earnshaw’s lawful heir, and makes him spiteful. When Earnshaw dies and Hindley takes over Wuthering Heights, he reduces Heathcliff to stable-hand status while he squanders the family fortune on booze and gambling and neglects his wife, who dies of consumption soon after giving birth to their son, Hareton. Hindley also nearly kills little Hareton at one point by tossing him over a bannister because his crying annoys him.

Fennell tries to make up for getting rid of Hindley by grafting his dissolute and violent nature onto old Earnshaw himself (Martin Clunes). This not only removes the complex triangular relationship among the three quasi-siblings (prefiguring the Heathcliff–Catherine–Edgar love triangle), but it also turns Catherine’s doting dad into that favourite feminist cardboard villain: the toxic patriarch. In a drunken fit of pique over a missed celebration of his birthday, Earnshaw flogs Heathcliff with a horsewhip to within an inch of his life, leaving his back a mess of gaping welts and blood. (This particular topos—the abusive-drunkard father covering his son’s back with permanent scars from beatings—seems to be another current trend in female-directed films, cf. Hamnet again.) The only thing to be said about this is that it gives Clunes a chance to turn in the only interesting performance in the movie as he grins and sneers amid his towers of empty bottles. Cathy, meanwhile, offers Heathcliff sweet solace; she’s Little Nell with overactive hormones. Earnshaw’s alcoholism eventually kills him, and Cathy kicks his corpse in the head before donning one of her immense dresses for the funeral.

This makes for not much of a plot. Fennell softens the temperaments of Heathcliff and Cathy, who are both noxious pieces of work in Brontë’s novel despite their physical beauty. Brontë’s Heathcliff is surly but sober, in contrast to Hindley’s drunk, and he plots the revenge he plans to exact with care; Cathy flies into rages, pinches the servants when they annoy her, and is generally rude to everyone. Fennell preserves some of Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s antisocial traits, but she makes the couple more sinned against than sinning. Heathcliff runs off after overhearing Cathy declare that she would be “degraded” if she marries him, so she marries into the Lintons and moves into their manicured estate, Thrushcross Grange. In the book, the Lintons are landed hereditary gentry of refined tastes and manners, and Edgar is a handsome and kindly young fellow who has adored Cathy since both were children, even though she makes him put up with a lot. In Fennell’s film, the Lintons are nouveau-riche arrivistes and Edgar is a slightly chubby textile-capitalist who entertains to wasteful excess and decorates his stately home with garish vulgarity and a touch of fetishism (he has Cathy’s bedroom painted to match her skin, down to the freckles).

Heathcliff then returns clean-shaven and wealthy (even though we are told he is unable to read or write), and attired in his spiffy new Beau Brummel wardrobe plus a flirty little gold earring. He lords it at Wuthering Heights, which he has bought from old Earnshaw to pay off the latter’s gambling debts, and he and Cathy, now neighbours, commence their adulterous adventures on the moors. Heathcliff also marries Isabella (Alison Oliver), another of the few characters from the book whom Fennell retains. In the book, Isabella is Edgar’s virginal younger sister who becomes infatuated with Heathcliff. He persuades her to elope, and then he imprisons and physically and mentally mistreats her. She escapes and flees to London, where she bears their son, Linton, whom she keeps away from his father until she dies.

But in Fennell’s film, Isabella is a freak with a Roseanne Roseannadanna frizz. And she’s not Edgar’s sister but his “ward” and a figure of derision. At one point, Fennell even makes the poor girl the butt of a dirty joke involving a scrapbook (it went over the heads of the opening-day audience with whom I saw the movie, so I won’t rehearse it here). There’s some sadism in Isabella’s relationship with Heathcliff, all right, but it’s cosplay sadism (Fennell seems to have a thing for BDSM) right out of 21st-century kink-culture. “Do you want me to stop?” Heathcliff asks Isabella several times, in keeping with today’s rules of enthusiastically consensual bondage, before he puts her into a dog collar and leash while she pants and barks.

Eventually, Edgar catches on and bans Heathcliff from Thrushcross Grange. This happens in the book, too. But in the movie, Fennell has Nelly Dean rat out Heathcliff. Brontë’s Nelly is a stout, garrulous housekeeper and Yorkshire native who narrates the story of Cathy and Heathcliff (occasionally unreliably) to the novel’s narrator Mr. Lockwood. But in keeping with the current fashion for colourblind casting in period drama (cf. Bridgerton), Fennell’s Nelly is played by Vietnamese American actress Hong Chau and transformed into Cathy’s mendacious paid companion. Dour, drably dressed, uptight, and disapproving, Nelly is the Fu Manchu of the Heathcliff–Cathy relationship, doing everything underhanded she can to keep the lovers apart, including intercepting and destroying Heathcliff’s love letters (dictated to Isabella because he’s illiterate). This is hardly a flattering ethnic stereotype, but that’s the hazard of DEI casting.

Meanwhile Cathy falls pregnant—by Edgar, not Heathcliff—just as she does in the book. In the novel, she dies giving birth to her daughter, also named Cathy, who plays a key role as an avatar of her mother in the story’s second half. But in Fennell’s movie, there is no daughter and Cathy perishes from sepsis after the baby dies in her womb and she fails to miscarry (a possible homicide engineered by Nelly). Heathcliff rushes to her deathbed on horseback, but it’s too late, so he climbs into bed with her corpse to weep. And that’s it. We never learn what happens to any of these characters afterwards.