Some people can’t get enough of classic English literature — I
attribute that more to Keira Knightley, than to the quality of the books — yet I
think even they will grow weary of Wuthering
Heights.
Emily Brontë’s book
is taught in schools and cherished among literature professors, and you can
feel those qualities rattling in its film presentation, which is a dizzying, patience-stretching
marathon of boredom lit only by candlelight and scored by the barely audible
whispers of its cast.
Much of the movie takes place as characters stare out windows … sigh … pondering. Every now and again
the film mixes it up and has them peering through cracked doors, wooden slats
or grey-green thistles that whip back and forth in the wind that gasps through
the hills of the sprawling estate known as Wuthering Heights
The movie begins with Heathcliff, a dark-skinned child who finds
himself adopted by a white family, the Earnshaws, in the late 1700s in England . His
adoptive father raises him as his own, even baptizing him in a Christian
ceremony, which causes resentment from the man’s biological son, Hindley
Earnshaw, but not from his daughter, Catherine, who takes a liking to
Heathcliff. This is the central relationship in the film, and it grows very
stale very quickly. Catherine, of course, loves Heathcliff, but her own hand
and the hands of others guide her away from the uneducated boy. Buckle up, romantic
tragedy ahead. The first sign of calamity is when the father dies, and cruel
Hindley makes Heathcliff a servant.
Halfway through, Heathcliff leaves to go to school and experience
the world and comes back to re-discover Catherine to only find that things have
grown more complicated. There are children now, in-laws and husbands. And
Hindley, who was so abusive to Heathcliff, is a deranged drunk. I kept getting
the feeling that the movie was leaving out crucial bits of the book (which I
have not read). This alone is fine; not everything can fit into a film. But
they did have lots of room to include Heathcliff standing at windows, or of
Catherine laying in fields, or of the two of them tumbling down hills. It’s all
broth, no meat.
While the film was occasionally evocative and moody, it often
went too far. At many points I wanted a better cinematographer on set to light
the scenes appropriately. Much of the film is shot in the dark with little to
no lighting. Candlelight just doesn’t cut it. Working against the film further are
its mumbling actors, who I struggled to hear amid their whispering. Combine
these two impairments and Wuthering Heights
Certainly there is a big, dynamic story to take in, but it is
often clouded by director Andrea Arnold’s limited vision or budget. Fans of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
