NOTE: This was an article I wrote for Don't Panic when Wuthering Heights premiered at Venice, but for some reason I missed putting it up on here when I was putting up the other Don't Panic articles. I'm putting it up now because I'm seeing the film tonight and I'm going to review it at some point in the near future.
Andrea Arnold’s take on Wuthering Heights premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival, but it appears to be yet another adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic novel which has fallen short. Just why is it so difficult to film?
For fans of the book, there has never been a satisfactory film or TV adaptation of Wuthering Heights. There have been more adaptations than you can shake a stick at following the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon 1939 version, all of which have had varying degrees of success but never quite managed to capture the book’s spirit. The early reviews coming out of Venice this week suggest that Andrea Arnold’s adaptation will be consigned to the same scrap-heap as all of the others – despite a bold style reminiscent more of Terrence Malick than Merchant-Ivory, a ‘crucial lack of chemistry’ between the two leads has been cited as the film’s main problem.
The main problem is that Wuthering Heights is really two novels in one, the first featuring Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley and the Lintons; the second featuring Heathcliff, Cathy, Edgar and Hareton. The first part is undoubtedly more dramatic than the second, but the second completes the saga and offers closure and hope to the story – those adaptations that discard the children always feel unfinished. Arnold has cut the story of the children, though she still follows Heathcliff until his death. Surely a straight adaptation of the book minus the character of Lockwood could be done in 150-odd minutes? Failing that, just go the whole hog and do a three-hour-long film – it might become The Godfather of period adaptations.
Then you’ve got to get the casting right. Olivier’s Heathcliff was too tidy and cultured and Juliette Binoche, who played both Catherine and Cathy in the 1992 version, was FRENCH for God’s sake. There have also been issues with the ages of the actors as opposed to the characters they are portraying. For the majority of the novel Heathcliff and Catherine are around 20, but they consistently been played by actors 10 or 15 years older (Tom Hardy in ITV’s 2009 version was 32), with Heathcliff, described as a dark-skinned gypsy, always played by white actors. Arnold has rectified this in her version, casting unknown Leeds actor James Howson as the first black actor to play the role, with Skins’ Kaya Scodelario as Catherine. Howson is 25, Scodelario is 19.
Finally, it is crucial for the director to get the tone and feel of the book right. Arnold, who won acclaim for her films Red Road and Fish Tank, has by all accounts gone for the same gritty approach that made her name, albeit on 1800s moors rather than modern-day council estates, and seems to have got this right in terms of presenting the desolation and wildness of the moors, but I have yet to see a Heathcliff and Catherine display any of the passion Bronte describes. This is also a casting issue, but a director’s job is to guide an actor towards the performance they want in order to best represent the story. None have succeeded so far, and it is this, more than anything else, that determines whether a Wuthering Heights adaptation lives or dies.
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