‘Wuthering Heights’ Review: A Timeless Classic Gets an Update

I am a philistine. I’ve never read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I’ve never even seen any of the previous film adaptations. As far as I’m concerned, Heathcliff is an orange cat with black stripes. So I entered Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights unconcerned about its fidelity as an adaptation. Based on my rudimentary research after the fact, I’m guessing those who do care about literary accuracy may be flummoxed by some of writer/director Emerald Fennell’s choices. None of them bothered me.

Removed from its source material (at least in the mind of this one particular ignoramus), Fennel’s Wuthering Heights is a striking, sensual movie filled with big gestures and bold stylistic choices. No one in Wuthering Heights, either in front of the camera or behind it, does anything halfway. The colors are vibrant, the costumes are extravagant, the music swells and roars, and stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi tear at each other’s clothing and suck on each other’s faces (and, occasionally, move tastefully in the vicinity of other body parts).

This is the sort of movie that inspires a person to Google “when was the umbrella invented?” because the actors spend so much time standing in the pouring rain without even so much as raising their hand to keep the water out of their eyes. These characters are too stricken by unquenchable longing to care about such mortal concerns as wet clothes. (The internet tells me umbrellas became popular in England in the early 1700s, by the by.)

Warner Bros.

The unquenchable longers in this case are Cathy (Robbie), the only living child of Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), the owner of Wuthering Heights (which looks like a home built inside some sort of ancient stone temple) and Heathcliff (Elordi), who Mr. Earnshaw adopts after witnessing the abuse he suffers living on the streets of Liverpool — although the alcoholic, near-destitute Earnshaw is prone to violent rages himself.

As Cathy and Heathcliff grow up they become very close, even though the Earnshaw family treats Heathcliff like an unpaid servant. Heathcliff (a name given to him by Cathy) is protective enough of his adoptive sister that by the time he matures into the towering Elordi, his back is covered in scars from all the whippings he’s endured from Cathy’s father on her behalf.

Once grown herself, Robbie’s Cathy steals more than a few glances at Heathcliff’s scarred, muscular back as he works in Wuthering Heights’ stables, and she even sneaks off to the moors to swoon over him (and, uh, do other things) after they both spy on two servants hooking up in a barn. But just as the star-crossed lovers are about to give in to their semi-forbidden desires, a new family moves into the nearby estate headed by the kind, extremely wealthy, but not nearly as smolderingly hunky Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).

When Linton takes an instant liking to Cathy and proposes marriage, it falls to her to decide whether to follow her heart or marry for money. The latter choice is the more sensible one; it would ensure her destitute family’s survival for years or perhaps generations to come. But since when is the heart sensible? And did you get a look at Jacob Elordi’s back muscles? I mean those things are big.

Warner Bros.

Hopefully the publicity images I’ve chosen to run with this review convey the incredible care that went into Wuthering Heights’ visuals, including the moody, fog-soaked cinematography by Linus Sandgren, the ornate production design by Suzie Davies, and the bold costumes by Jacqueline Durran. Entire essays could be written about the way the color red seeps into and then out of Cathy’s clothes; first in the form of pig blood that stains the bottom of her white dress as she trudges past Heathcliff at work, then gradually overtaking her lavish ball gowns as she settles into married life. There can be a very thin line between finely wrought and overwrought in movies, but Wuthering Heights — which includes such audacious flourishes as flesh-colored wallpaper (complete with moles?!) — effectively deploys a heightened aesthetic to compliment the heightened emotions of its performers.

But c’mon: No one is going to see Wuthering Heights for its heightened aesthetic. They’re going to bask in the onscreen chemistry between Robbie and Elordi, which is on display in numerous love scenes and amorous montages set to original songs by Charli xcx. The stars are memorable both together and apart — Robbie is particularly convincing whenever she attempts to hide Cathy’s hunger for Heathcliff beneath a serene facade that looks ready to crumble under the weight of her inner turmoil at any moment.

Elordi has the trickier role. Heathcliff is, at different points, a tender romantic and a monstrous brute, something Elordi manages to almost subliminally convey with a low rumble of a speaking voice that sounds equally seductive and threatening. (He also at one point lifts Robbie into the air by her bodice one-handed, an act that will almost certainly be remembered as one of the grander gestures in movie kiss history.) When Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights brokenhearted over Cathy’s decision, the film sags a little until his return — although to what extent that is by design, since it mirrors Cathy’s own inner life during that portion of the film, is debatable.

Warner Bros.

Without knowing much about Wuthering Heights on the page beyond what I can glean on Wikipedia, the film this adaptation most reminded me of was Fennell’s own Saltburn, another story about wealth, class, and the unendurable agony of life where you are not loved by Jacob Elordi and his incredible back muscles. Although set centuries apart, both of Fennell’s recent films depict high society as an alluring, inescapable trap.

Between the two, though, I greatly prefer Wuthering Heights, which looks and sounds fantastic, peppers its torrid love story with a few moments of absurd humor — did I mention the veiny, fleshy wallpaper? — and carries itself with the assured confidence of its Byronic hero. (I’m a philistine, but I’m not a dummy.)

RATING: 7/10