Review: WUTHERING HEIGHTS

 by Rob DiCristino

You didn’t read it? Don’t worry, neither did she.

Let’s begin with a disclaimer that’s sure to make writer/director Emerald Fennell cream in what I presume are her very stylish and expensive jeans: As an English major, language arts teacher, and lifelong fan of, you know, books, I found myself utterly flabbergasted by her new adaptation of Emily Brontë 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights. Fennell would say that disgust is by design, of course as the Saltburn filmmaker has made no bones about how much she gets off on challenging fuddy-duddy sensibilities like mine, how much she delights in provoking the “elites” who dismiss her work as misguided fluff that, among other sins, unintentionally reaffirms the social inequalities she seems to think she’s critiquing. As if in wholehearted celebration of that budding reputation, her Wuthering Heights is a lurid and trashy Tumblr-core fan edit of Brontë’s novel that omits roughly ten major characters, about a hundred pages of story, and nearly all of the gothic horror that make it such an enduring masterpiece. But again, that’s all precisely the point, which means that Wuthering Heights is also the most rousing success of Emerald Fennell’s nascent career.

We begin on the Yorkshire moors, where the boisterous and abusive drunkard Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) owns a remote farming estate known as Wuthering Heights. One day, to the delight of his young daughter, Catherine (Charlotte Mellington), and the chagrin of his household staff (headed by Vy Nguyen’s Nelly), Earnshaw returns from Liverpool with an unscrubbed, illiterate foundling whom Catherine names Heathcliff (Owen Cooper). The two are immediately inseparable, nurturing a mutual attraction that grows as the imperious Catherine molds the dowdy Heathcliff in her image. Decades later, the insolvent Earnshaws look to Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) — the wealthy owner of nearby Thrushcross Grange — for salvation, and Heathcliff (now Jacob Elordi) watches in horror as Catherine (now Margot Robbie) manipulates the posh dolt into proposing marriage. He then sets off on a quest for redemption, returning with new clothes, a mysterious fortune, and a solemn vow to make Catherine regret telling Nelly (now Hong Chau) that he was unworthy of her affections.

A typical interpretation of Wuthering Heights would characterize it as a haunting tale of generational trauma, a story about the pathological entanglement between two people whose unquenchable thirst for mutually-assured destruction brings chaos and misery to every unfortunate bystander in their orbit. Brontë’s novel is a darkly ironic critique of Victorian class mores, to be sure, but it also illustrates the spiritual dimensions of romantic passion and argues that those societal guardrails are hopeless in the face of our self-destructive nature. By seeding Heathcliff’s Byronic heroism in his outcast status — a loneliness born of his low birth and fueled by Catherine’s rejection and the abuse of her brother, Hindley — Brontë reinforces the hopeless inevitability of his moral corruption. For her part, the volatile, mercurial Catherine’s refusal to rectify her social ambition with her compulsive attachment dooms her to a life of tragedy, a familial curse that can only be lifted by a next generation of children armed with the empathy to buck these vicious trends.

In Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, Catherine gets so turned on by her cook kneading bread dough that she rushes outside in her skirts to rub one out behind a tree. Later — probably while reminiscing about the time she watched a pair of servants get kinky with the leather straps of a horse’s facemask — she fondles the gaping mouth of a dead fish laid out on her dinner table. Oh, then there’s a scene where Heathcliff explains that he can track Catherine by the smell of her lady juices. That scene, of course — OF COURSE — comes just before he enslaves his wife Isabella (Allison Oliver) in such an orgiastic thrall of sexual delight that she’s willing to chain herself to the fireplace and bark like a dog at anyone who approaches the house. Yes, it seems that no one in this Wuthering Heights is able to crack an egg without contemplating how to use the yolks as lubricant, which, while it may not leave room to explore the texture of Brontë’s source material, does fit in with the “middle school journal” vibe Fennell brings to her entire filmography.

And as that filmography takes shape, we’re getting a better picture of its essential childishness, the myopic perspectives on sex, death, and morality that reflect Fennell’s impatience with the complexity and nuance that make the works she tends to adapt — if not straight-up steal from — so affecting. Instead of interrogating the destructive nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s obsessions, Fennell’s maximalist orgy of a film celebrates the romance of their tragedy in the grandest possible terms. Designed and lensed with the opulence of a Baz Luhrmann epic and scored with electropop from Charli XCX, the film isn’t so much Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as it is Catherine and Heathcliff’s, a truncated, Tik Tok-friendly version in which their behavior is ultimately excusable because there is no second generation to suffer their consequences. Fennell isn’t the first filmmaker to omit the back half of the novel, of course — that goes back to William Wyler’s 1939 original — but it’s a choice that only compounds the brainless immaturity of her approach to the material.

But, look. You and I both know that you’re not here for my scholastic analysis. You want to know if Wuthering Heights is as hot and steamy as the trailers suggest. You want to know what the sex scenes are like. Are there any boobies? Does Jacob Elordi hang dong? The answer is no! It’s all pretty tame! That’s the trouble with Fennell’s adolescent, smut-forward approach, isn’t it? Because as anyone who’s ever actually had sex knows, the anticipation is most of the fun, and nothing in Fennell’s love scenes — which are basically limited to one montage shot waist-up under flowery bodices— could possibly compete with all the quivering anticipation that comes before. Don’t get me wrong: Jacob Elordi is a fucking stud — the first shot of him post-transformation elicited a literal gasp from my preview audience — but even his glowering gets tiresome by the two-hour mark, especially since Fennell’s adaptation denies Heathcliff most of the sociopathic insanity that normally makes the role such an actor’s delight. Robbie, too, is shortchanged, as Fennell only has the attention span for about half of Catherine’s famous “I am Heathcliff” monologue.

With all that said — and trust me, there’s a lot more that I haven’t said — Wuthering Heights is nonetheless the most self-assured film of Emerald Fennell’s career, a composed, engaging, and entertaining piece of pop art that synthesizes her LiveJournal ethos with an undeniable talent for staging and composition. She may lack the insight or inspiration to become one of our great auteurs, but she’s developing a clear eye for what a movie is supposed to feel like — how to elicit a laugh from a clever edit and light gorgeous actors like movie stars. Her Wuthering Heights may be a profoundly dumb exercise that relies on the juvenile brand of tantalization that we typically leave behind after high school, but that won’t make it any less of a box office smash this Valentine’s Day, no less of a cheeky antidote to whatever “sex is bad, actually” discourse is floating around Zoomer channels on whatever social media channel they’re using these days. I’ll be damned if I know, but then, it’s not for me. Neither is Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Don’t worry about me, though. I know how to read.

Wuthering Heights hits U.S. theaters today, February 13th.