Out on the Wily, Windy Moors...

One of the best reviews. From Charlotte Allen at Quillette:

It’s all R-rated sex and the characters keep their clothes on (their passion is too urgent for undressing), but Fennell makes up for that by having Heathcliff do quite a bit of licking—of Cathy’s face mostly, but also of her fingers after he catches her masturbating on the moors (which have undoubtedly seen worse over the millennia). It also rains constantly, drenching the lovers mid-coitus—another “primal” touch added by Fennell. The results are often risible. I enjoyed a good laugh when Heathcliff and Cathy sneak up to a hayloft and peep through the floorboards at two lusty young servants engaging in a bit of BDSM with the horse tack. And a reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter remarked that a shot of a shirtless, sweating Heathcliff stacking hay bales was “so close to gay farmer porn I giggled.” Just in case we haven’t got the idea, Fennel lays the sexual symbolism on extra thick during a scene in which Cathy cracks raw eggs onto Heathcliff’s bedsheets, and another in which we watch Cathy knead wet dough in slow-motion like she’s giving an erotic massage.

But for most of the film’s running time, I was bored. After about an hour, I began to wonder when, how, and if all of this was going to end. Part of the problem is that for all their strenuous exertions, there’s no chemistry between Elordi and Robbie at all. Elordi is good-looking and swarthy enough, but he doesn’t have the hammy charisma of, say, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation. It doesn’t help that, for the first third of Fennell’s movie before he makes his fortune and cleans himself up into Hot Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff resembles a stringy-haired, bushy-bearded hobo (like Charles Manson, but a lot taller). Whenever he kissed Margot Robbie, much less licked her fingers, I recoiled on her behalf.

And Margot Robbie is comically miscast as Cathy. She’s a rare blonde bombshell who can also act, and she’s a standout in spunky, high-spirited roles like Mrs Wolf of Wall Street, Tonya Harding, Sharon Tate, and Barbie. But she can’t do tragic period heroines well. Furthermore, Robbie was 34 when “Wuthering Heights” was shot, which is much too old to play the part of Cathy. In the novel, Cathy develops her crush on Heathcliff when she is fifteen, and dies aged just nineteen. This is not necessarily fatal to the adaptation—Merle Oberon was 27 when the Wyler version was shot—except that Robbie had just given birth to her son when filming began, and her postpartum-thickened waistline and maternal pheromones make it hard to take her moor-romping seriously.

Nor is Robbie well-served by the movie’s much-praised but actually ugly and unflattering costumes—the handiwork of Jacqueline Durran (who also designed the costumes for Barbie). Nearly every one of Robbie’s frocks features a tight-waisted bodice that makes her look like an opera coloratura instead of a Yorkshire ingenue, and a neckline (if it can be called that) cut to emphasise her heaving cleavage (I don’t know whether it was push-up bras or nursing, but Robbie isn’t that busty). On the Wuthering Heights farm, she sports a revealing Oktoberfest dirndl outfit that looks like it was copied from the St. Pauli Girl label. Once she marries into the conspicuously consuming Lintons, there must be a hundred different costume changes. But it’s all more of the same, except with even bigger puffed sleeves and skirts so voluminous that when Robbie is running across the moors in long shot, she looks like a bowling ball. A crimson bowling ball specifically, since Durran apparently decided that Cathy’s sensuality required her to almost always be dressed in red. Red garments with their bloody connotations seem to be de rigueur these days for the tempestuous heroines of female-directed movies (cf. Hamnet). 

There is no character development in Fennell’s film because there are hardly any characters. Fennell has ruthlessly stripped away most of the ones that Brontë created, including an entire second generation of Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s offspring (not by each other). She’s by no means the first Wuthering Heights adapter to lop off the novel’s second half; William Wyler did the same, as did many of those who followed him. After all, it’s not easy to make a movie version of a book work when the A-list female protagonist dies long before the story is over. But in Fennell’s version, the amputation means there’s hardly any story left at all. (Read more.)

Share