Domination Nation: Film Review of Wuthering Heights
★★1/2
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the romantic epic spanning generations has been made, remade, reimagined, mounted onstage, and has even been transformed into a musical, an opera, and a graphic novel. It is a narrative whose thematic threads have been co-opted by elements ranging from feminism to Marxism literary theory to class systems, to racism, and now, to the politics of sexuality.
It speaks volumes that one work can be coopted to so many diverse ideologies. The epic—and eternal—romance of Heathcliff and Cathy, the subjugation of their love to the powers that be, and the jealousy, anger, and the hate that festers in Heathcliff’s heart because of the forces that pulled them apart is a compelling, powerful, and cruel tale that does not have a happy ending. Or beginning. Or middle.
In the beginning of Emerald Fennel’s latest version Wuthering Heights, young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington), is the emotionally abused ward of Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), the drunken owner of the estate known as Wuthering Heights. Her only friend is Nelly (Hong Chau), her paid companion. After one trip to the city, he returns with an orphan boy who Cathy promptly names Heathcliff (Owen Cooper). Even though Cathy immediately begins to boss her new brother around, dominating his every move, she slowly earns his trust, even to the point of shielding her from her father’s drunken rages and his oft-used whip. Cathy and Heathcliff become inseparable.
It becomes obvious that Earnshaw is slowly gambling the family fortune away. Cathy (Margot Robbie) learns that a new family is moving into Thrushcross Grange, a neighboring estate. When she ventures near to spy on them, she twists her ankle and is taken in by new owner, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his ditzy teenage ward Isabella (Alison Oliver). Linton is soon smitten with Cathy who also wins the puppy-like adoration of Isabella. Meanwhile, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) broods at home, waiting for Cathy’s return.
When she finally does return, dressed in finery provided by Linton, Heathcliff snubs her. When Linton arrives to propose, Cathy, faced with poverty and ruin, accepts, and Heathcliff, devastated by her betrayal, leaves. Five years pass, and Cathy and Nelly enjoy the extravagant lifestyle afforded to them by the infatuated Mr. Linton. Isabella dotes on Cathy, following her every move.
After a five-year absence, Heathcliff returns. He has somehow mysteriously amassed a fortune and soon makes his intention clear. He has come back for Cathy. Their mutual doomed passion leads them down a path of ruination, shame, and degradation.
In the original novel, Bronte split the novel into two sections covering two generations. This current iteration of the work, like several others, focuses only on the first, ignoring the Linton and Earnshaw descendants—as well as Heathcliff’s abuse of them—and concentrates instead on Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship.
From the very beginning, Fennel frames their relationship as a power struggle. The high-spirited (to the point of obnoxiousness) Cathy demands that Heathcliff learn to read and to do whatever she demands—which he does. Later, as adults, the two happen to witness two of the servants, Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) and Zillah (Amy Morgan) engaged in sadomasochistic horseplay, a motif revisited in one of Isabella’s relationships, and Heathcliff begins to exert his own leverage in their relationship.
Soon after the marriage, when Cathy moves into Thrushcross Grange, Isabella shows Cathy a doll she made of her and then places it in a dollhouse that is a perfect replica of the Linton home, a metaphor for Cathy’s new powerlessness as a housewife (a very Barbie-like reference). When she first meets Heathcliff, the young and hopelessly naïve Isabella is smitten. Cathy immediately takes control, bullying and intimidating the young girl like the queen bee in a middle-school clique. When Heathcliff is spurned, he also exerts his magnetism over the helpless young girl.
The film begins with an unexpected—and odd—reference to the sexual. On a darkened screen, the audience hears a man moaning and a creaking noise that sounds very much like a bed. The camera then reveals that the moaning man is in the process of being hung and that it is the hangman’s noose creaking with the weight of the doomed man. Some boys in the audience notice the dying man has a “stiffie”, a usual occurrence during a hanging. Several other members of the audience, including a nun, are unmistakably aroused at the spectacle. Sex through power and power through sex seem to be as inevitable as death in this version of Fennel’s vision. The power of wealth is what lures Cathy from Heathcliff; it is only when he regains power through his own fortune that he can return to her. Linton wins Cathy not because of love, but because of his fortune.
The production design of Thrushcross Grange, like much of this film, is strangely surreal, expressionistic, and lurid. The library is dominated by a vivid red tile floor. Linton has furnished Cathy’s bedroom with paint that is her exact skin tone. He has even duplicated one of her freckles on the wall. The house shines, sparkles, and is almost a fantasy fever dream of beauty and opulence. It is all that wealth promises.
The surreality of the film is also evident in the Wuthering Heights estate itself. Never seen in its entirety, always integrated with the surrounding operatically overdone landscape, it seems to be part of the moor itself. During a scene later in the movie, the alcoholic Earnshaw is found collapsed in a room with literally mountains of empty bottles surrounding him. Later, as Cathy lies ill, she is treated with leeches, which are also attached to the walls of her bedroom—the simulacrum of her skin.
Whether Fennel may be seeking to make a statement on the English nobility (see Saltburn), or to underline the calculus of power sexuality in this society, the results, while visually fascinating, are decidedly mixed, mostly because as attractive as Margot Robbie and Jacob Elrodi are on the big screen, they do not possess the chemistry to make this, the most passionate and tempestuous relationship in all of English literature, believable.
Robbie is as fiery, impulsive, and as headstrong as any screen worthy Cathy should be, but something does not ring true in this portrayal. Her Cathy seems to be hollow, a semblance of passion and desire, rather than the real thing. Elrodi’s Heathcliff smolders and glowers well enough, but he seems to lack any real anger at a world which has denied him everything, including the woman he loves, because of who he is. The anger and vindictiveness necessary for Bronte’s Heathcliff to bully and terrorize the children of his nemeses is nowhere near apparent.
This film was a fascinating examination of the intricacies of sexual politics and class warfare, but Fennel didn’t need to redo this particular story to achieve those aims. What she has ended up with is an overproduced, overlong, and oversaturated enigma. After Heathcliff’s return, the film meanders from encounter to encounter between the two lovers without pushing the plot forward. The whole film seems to stall, teetering on the edge of a garish, surrealistic dreamscape.
I always imagined the color palette of Wuthering Heights to be as bleak and gray as the moors surrounding it. I never imagined Thrushcross Grange to look like a cross between a carnival and Trump’s oval office, but Fennel had a unique vision for this narrative, this milieu, and the thematic links between power, sexuality, and wealth. Credit is due to a fine cinematic talent attempting to push an old envelope to new lengths. It’s a shame the passion of these two lovers did not match that of the director.
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