A few years ago, when I watched ‘Promising Young Woman’, the debut feature film of English actress and screenwriter Emerald Fennell, I set out to follow the career of this promising filmmaker, who with that film won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and also received nominations for Best Picture and Best Achievement in Directing. I did not see her second feature film, but now I have watched the third, the ambitious project that brings to the screen the troubled love story from the pages of Emily Brontë’s novel ‘Wuthering Heights‘. As in all her films, Emerald Fennell is also the author of the script, which in this case is a screen adaptation of the novel. A very free adaptation, a real reinterpretation. In principle, I have no problem with that. It’s just that too many things don’t work or are not to my taste in this cinematic version of a book that has been brought to larger or smaller screens at least 21 times so far. It is, in my opinion, a spectacular and ambitious adaptation, which aims to present a different vision from the classic interpretations of the novel, but which lacks the social commentary and passionate authenticity of that story of a love relationship that destroys its heroes.
Those who have read the book or seen at least one of the film or television versions of the novel will recognize the main characters, but with small adaptations in essential places. Heathcliff seems less gloomy than I remember him, and Cathy seems much more mature, and therefore more evil, than the young woman just out of adolescence in the book. Their passion is present and well-founded in the childhood scenes (the best part of the film in my opinion) but the timid exchanges of glances and the falsely accidental touches in the novel are replaced by not very successful scenes of almost violent eroticism . The entire film seems marked by the cruelty of the opening scene, an execution by hanging that offers the children Cathy and Nelly (her companion maid) a spectacle that will mark their lives. Other characters from the book are not present in Emerald Fennell‘s version. This is the case of Cathy’s brother, part of the character being taken over by her father. The next generation with its characters completely disappears, as does the prologue and epilogue that recall in the book the events thirty years after they happened.
Emerald Fennell wants viewers to understand that they are not watching an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel so much as her personal vision of a story that is greater in purpose than the details related to the era in which the novel’s action took place. The half-ruined house of the Earnshaws and the sumptuous estate of the Lintons acquire proportions, architectures, lights, shadows and colors that amplify the messages about the families that live in them. The screenwriter gave up any allusion to Heathcliff’s race (which in the novel doubled the theme of class differences with the implicit one of racial differences), instead she cast Hong Chau – a Thai actress with Asian features that are hardly believable in the context of the era – in the role of Nelly (a pivotal character in the film as well, a kind of Polonius of this drama) and Shazad Latif in the role of Edgar. The outstanding acting performances however seemed to me to belong to Martin Clunes (delicious as Cathy’s father) and to Owen Cooper, in his first role on the big screen, that of Heathcliff at young age. The young actor, after his formidable performance in the series ‘Adolescence’, seems to be building a career that could become that of a big star. The main roles bring together two of the most talented and successful actors of the moment. Margot Robbie is an actress that I liked in everything she did up to this film. She was terrific in Barbie, but now she’s paying the price of that success and has to get rid of the image created by that film through roles that put less use of her wonderfully blue eyes and her physical beauty in general. In Jacob Elordi‘s filmography, Heathcliff from ‘Wuthering Heights‘ comes after the role of the Creature in ‘Frankenstein’. From the absolute monster to one of the male symbols of romantic love. His transition is fine, but the two actors didn’t seem to me to have passionate and erotic tension on screen. Paradoxically, in a relatively bold film like this, it’s precisely the love scenes between the two that are among the least successful. I respect the fact that Emerald Fennell aimed further than a simple cinematic adaptation, the film is in many moments beautiful in images and sound (especially when it uses Charli XCX‘s original songs), but the emotion and drama of the novel are not found on screen and have not been replaced with anything else.