Emerald Fennell’s film of Wuthering Heights, starrring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, is an underrated gem. The movie brings to life the dark gothic weirdness of Emily Brontë’s literary masterpiece with beautiful visuals and an intriguing depth of character that is hard to portray with such strange and unlikable personalities. Neither Cathy nor Heathcliff are particularly good people, and this makes the book hard to adapt for the screen. They are also fascinating characters with intense drama, making the book a great work to adapt if the director is willing to explore such strange personalities and dark themes, components which can easily be off putting to audiences. This new film is more than up to the task and gives and delivers a satisfylingly dark, weird, and beautiful version of the story to the screen.
A Hollywood classic with a masterful performance from Laurence Olivier has been acclaimed for long, and that is an important version to see. Yet, the classic lacks the dark weirdness of the book in many respects. Olivier was renowned for his portrayal of Richard III, and this made him an ideal actor for Heathcliff. Hs performance is memorable, dark, and forceful for every scene he gets in the classic, but the film doesn’t quite let him express how strange the novel is. It toned Brontë down through a screenplay that heavily truncated Heathcliff’s ability to be monstrous. That is not the case with the recent film. Jacob Elordi, also known for playing Frankenstein for Guillermo del Toro, gives a strong performance and uses his physical size to suggest a bit of an awkward brute, just like the Brontë novel. He comes across as primal and somehow connected to Cathy, whereas Olivier shows brilliant acting technique but seems somewhat detached and within his own world. Elordis’ performance suggests Heathcliff as a character that is a force of nature, wrapped into and made by the craggy landscape he came from.
The literary work is imbued with a deep mood of darkness and disjointedness that inhabits the landscape and seems to permeate everyone who lives on the moors. Fennel is up to the task of translating this material in powerful visual terms, with beautiful fog and shadows, some lovely scenes that are rich in candlelight, and extravagant set design that seems to reflect Cathy’s psychology. The mansion at Thrushcross Grange where Cathy lives after marrying Edgar Linton has exquisite and vivid rooms showing off impressive color schemes and set design made to match Margot Robbie’s dresses. That she produced this movie herself off of Barbie fame is a delightful and impressive surprise. Martin Scrosese saw something in this actress when he cast her in Wolf of Wall Street, well ahead of the fame that was to come. Seeing the fame from Barbie used to make an epic adaptation of one of the best works of English literature suggests that Scorsese was once again right about an actor he supported. Robbie’s performance has a psychological richness to the oddity of Cathy that is fascinating to watch. It’s as though this strange woman decontructs into her surroundings and relationships as the film progresses.
Caught between the polite sophistication of the refined man whom she marries, Linton, and the animality and cruelty of the wild Heathcliff, who she herself named when she found him as a child, she just can’t resist the primal side of her own excessive and curious nature. It’s as though the moors have infected her with a heathenism that just won’t depart from her urges. The film then shows how she deteriorates through obsessive love for an unlovable person. There is no real explanation for this. It is a matter of who she is, how she was brought up with Heathcliff as some forbidden savage, and the way the wild, barren, rough landscape of rocks, hills, mist, and rain made her want decay rather than perfection. The book is one of the best works of 19th century literature, perhaps the best one in English, for the bizzarre mood, personalities, and world that it builds. It reflects the imperfections of English life at a time of both great wealth and poverty. Brontë died at only 30, perhaps from drinking toxic water at her home. Margot Robbie portrays Cathy in a way that will make sure that Miss Brontë is well remembered in the 21st century. This film is essential and underrated.
