Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Is Extravagantly Superficial
Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution of the characters’ deep bond, from steadfast sibling affection toward a combative, quasi-incestuous desire. Catherine, incensed by Heathcliff’s treatment of her, slips several eggs into his bed; it’s a childish prank with an erotic undertone, to judge by how intently the camera scrutinizes the gooey, yolky mess beneath the blankets. Fennell has a fluid fixation; she wants passion to leave a stain. This much was clear from “Saltburn,” in which Oliver laps up a man’s cummy bathwater one moment and smears his lips with a woman’s menstrual blood the next. “Wuthering Heights,” for its part, is not to be out-slurped. In one especially heated sequence, Catherine, overcome with lust, dashes off to the moors and pleasures herself ferociously against the rocks. Along comes Heathcliff, who, aroused by what he sees, lifts the little onanist up by her bodice straps and licks her fingers clean, like someone in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial.
You might chuckle, as I did, and also wonder if Fennell is courting your laughter. It’s as if, in her determination to grant these immortal characters a feral, forthright sexuality, she couldn’t help but suppress a nervous snicker. There’s a reason for this tonal confusion: underneath Fennell’s brazen streak, I think, is a certain wobbliness of conviction—a failure of nerve. The film’s advertising materials have placed the title in quote marks (perhaps I should be referring to it as “ ‘Wuthering Heights’ ”), an affectation that Fennell explained, in a recent interview, as a show of humility—an acknowledgment that her interpretation is hers alone, and couldn’t possibly capture the depths of Brontë’s masterwork. Confronted with the film itself, though, I can’t help but read the punctuation ironically, as a halfhearted signifier of mockery or camp. Is Fennell being snarky, sincere, or both? She’s blurred those boundaries before, notably in her Oscar-winning début feature, “Promising Young Woman” (2020), an archly stylized rape-revenge thriller that was, depending on whom you asked, either righteously transgressive or noxiously coy. This “Wuthering Heights” feels similarly divided against itself, and to less thematically pertinent ends.
This is hardly the first “Wuthering Heights,” good or bad, to fall short of its source material’s ambitions. Up to a point, the story unfolds as it always has: Catherine, in an ill-advised fit of pragmatism, agrees to marry Edgar (Shazad Latif), a decision that sends the rejected Heathcliff storming off into the night. He returns five years later, with a sizable fortune, the deed to Wuthering Heights, and dark-hearted motives that fall somewhere between revenge and reclamation. His ensuing scheme will ensnare Edgar’s naïve ward, Isabella (an amusing Alison Oliver), in a nightmare of a marriage, whose sadomasochistic undercurrents Fennell literalizes and carnalizes. She also shows us Catherine and Heathcliff repeatedly giving in to their desires, in the bedroom, in a horse-drawn carriage, and, most hotly and unhygienically, in the rain. (As I said: up to a point.)
Like some other adaptations—including those directed by Wyler, Luis Buñuel, and Andrea Arnold—this one steers clear of the novel’s second half, in which the torments of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance rebound, cruelly, on their descendants. Fennell has also dropped the elaborate framing devices that make Brontë’s book, among other things, a feast of unreliable narration. Everything that happens in its pages is relayed to us by Mr. Lockwood, a nosy tenant at Thrushcross Grange, or Nelly Dean, the Earnshaws’ ever-watchful housekeeper. (Fennell dispenses with Lockwood entirely; Nelly is played, with formidably chilly side-eye, by Hong Chau, but her narrator function has been excised.) The impact, on the page, is of a ghostly melodramatic hearsay: Catherine and Heathcliff, for all their vividness, can seem more like spectres than characters. They flicker in the darkness like candlelight, incandescent yet ephemeral.
