Emerald Fennell’s latest film attempts to capitalize on a classic work, with little success
BY JULIE HUANG — arts@theaggie.org
“Wuthering Heights,” Emerald Fennell’s third film, debuted in theaters on Feb. 13 starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.
The film has not only renewed interest in Emily Brontë’s original 1847 novel of the same title, but also revived an old debate: How faithful should an adaptation be to its source material? Does adaptational accuracy matter at all for a good story, especially if the original is hailed as one of the hallmarks of Western literary canon?
Marketing for “Wuthering Heights” described the film as “inspired by the greatest love story of all time.” This provocative claim constitutes an attempt to imbue the project with a sense of myth for the modern world — eternal, transcendent, larger-than-life.
Yet, there’s a catch in the film’s attempt to carve out a space in modern pop culture for itself by invoking the scandalously self-assured attitudes of Brontë’s tempestuous novel, which ignored the contemporary social mores of its time. By attempting to craft a metanarrative not based on its own substance but on the reputation of a more established work, “Wuthering Heights” invites all the baggage of public opinion and misconceptions inevitably attached to the lofty status of a “literary classic.”
Consequently, external discussion about the film is not merely an extraneous factor separate from the film’s artistic status. Rather, it might be enlightening to consider the current sociopolitical landscape in which this newest iteration of “Wuthering Heights” is borne as a love story.
Questions surrounding Fennell’s project are fueled by and perhaps even originate from the controversy surrounding the film’s casting decisions — which arose before the film ever came to the screen — when Elordi was revealed as Byronic hero Heathcliff. Detractors argued that Elordi’s whiteness erased a central aspect of Heathcliff’s character as a person of color (POC), which was integral to the structure of the novel’s story.
In Brontë’s work, Heathcliff’s non-whiteness is an insurmountable barrier between him and social success in pre-Victorian England, no matter how much money he accrues. This nuanced intersection between race and class is lost in translation due to Elordi’s casting.
Other dubious casting choices stick out like sore thumbs. Evidently, the film isn’t unwilling to feature POC actors — Nelly Dean is played by Vietnamese American actress Hong Chau, while Earnshaw’s harmless husband Edgar Linton is played by British actor Shazad Latif, who is of Pakistani descent.
Any negative implications of this seemingly race-blind casting of characters seem to be unintentional. However, the thoughtlessness threaded through the narrative seems almost like a presence of its own, materializing during unconscionable scenes where Earnshaw blasts her privileged husband in favor of her true love Heathcliff. After all, wealthy, genteel and privileged Edgar Linton is meant to represent everything that beleaguered Heathcliff is not. Casting a non-white actor to represent the height of privilege in pre-Victorian England seems a tad senseless, then.
But maybe the film is not meant to make sense. Its mission seems to be telling a story of forbidden love and yearning, soaring into the heights of passion without other considerations to weigh down the narrative with everyday drudgery.
The truth is that faithfulness to the original source material does not guarantee that an adaptation will be an enjoyable, meaningful experience. Every good adaptation necessarily contains elements of its creator, and the best adaptations are able to merge features of the original source material with the vision and ideas of those who are adapting it.
Fennell’s iteration of “Wuthering Heights” is not a bad film because it strays from Brontë’s vision. It’s a hard watch because it strips away the central themes and messages in the original novel, and then fails to replace those ideas with any meaning of its own.
The film’s relentless pursuit of portraying the pain of forbidden love leaves nothing to the imagination. Upon even marginally closer inspection, the “forbidden” aspect of Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s love is entirely performative. By forgoing the element of race entirely, Fennell neutralizes Heathcliff’s status as a racial outsider, which in the novel’s setting of pre-Victorian England, was an obstacle so high that no tower of mysterious wealth could topple it.
Thus, after Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s sexual attraction is consummated, and their affair is all but discovered by Earnshaw’s husband, yet allowed to continue regardless, no true obstacle remains for the two but their director’s desire to see them suffer.
The result is a directionless experience that leads only toward confusion and irritation for its viewers, with the exception of those who are satisfied with well-composed images of beautiful people getting touchy amid beautiful backdrops. Stripped of most of its social context, these glamorous scenes of yearning and suffering for forbidden love are little more than moving pictures.
There is aural beauty in this film. The original soundtrack album provided by Charli XCX is truly atmospheric, and conveys most of what little vision and intention the film possesses. It is the most original aspect of the film, but it also can’t make up for the overwhelming lack of substance or direction that permeates the rest of “Wuthering Heights.”
The visuals fall into the same sort of purgatory. The costumes are aesthetically appealing, and it is no detriment per se that they obviously stray away from period-accurate fashion. Yet despite their intentionally evocative bodice-ripper romance novel aesthetic, every one of Earnshaw’s decadent dresses may as well be generated by artificial intelligence in its attempt to simulate intention that just isn’t there.
The film’s leaning into physical passion is not the source of its lackluster storytelling either. It could have been ripe with meaning, as explicit imagery avails itself to a large array of critical commentary that could bear fruit.
Yet, it seems this love story is content to contain itself only in the beauty of aesthetics, without attaching that beauty to anything that might prevent it from flying upwards and going nowhere. If this version of “Wuthering Heights” is “the greatest love story of all time” refashioned for the modern age, what does that mean for our current moment?
Written by: Julie Huang — arts@theaggie.org
