Movie Review: Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights' is a bold but shallow take on Brontë's classic

Adaptations have taken various liberties with Brontë’s story, cutting characters and plot points in vain attempts to condense and tame its wildness and stubborn amorality. A poster for the 1920 film carried with it the tagline “Emily Brontë’s tremendous Story of Hate.” More than a century later, it’s being sold as a great love story, but, you know, with a wink. This is love (if you want to call it that) of the tortured, toxic, obsessive variety.

In a noble attempt to do something different, Fennell decided to make a movie that captured how “Wuthering Heights” made her feel the first time she read it, at age 14. It’s a heady experiment — a defiantly anti-academic interpretation that lets Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) finally do something about all that pent-up lust. Those quotation marks on the title card promise that this is not Brontë’s book at all.

Fennell reduces her story to a more simplistic narrative about hate and its polluting ripple effects. The film begins with a hanging that has young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) downright ecstatic, but she might just be a product of her environment: Her father (Martin Clunes) is an abusive, unloving drunk and their home is shabby, cold and deteriorating under mounting debts and harsh conditions. Her only companions are essentially employees: a maid, Nelly (Vy Nguyen as a child and Hong Chau as an adult), and Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), whom she claims as her pet. No Hindleys or Haretons here.

The miserable Earnshaw way of life stands in stark contrast with their happier, gentler neighbors, the Lintons, who inhabit the primly manicured Thrushcross Grange. Their home is within walking distance of Wuthering Heights and yet, in a sheltered valley, it seems worlds away. As in the book, Cathy decides to deny her heart for the promise of a comfortable life with Edgar Linton. Heathcliff overhears Cathy saying it would degrade her to marry him, and he disappears for years only to reemerge bathed, wealthy and with revenge and some light bondage on his mind. When they meet up again, their dynamic feels like “Wuthering Heights” by way of “Cruel Intentions.”

In these sex-deprived times at the cinema, if some corset kink, power games and smoldering star power from two genetically blessed Australians is what you’re looking for, “Wuthering Heights” might just satisfy that big-screen itch. There are myriad pleasures to be had in the bold, absurd pageantry and devilish scheming. Alison Oliver’s comic timing as the naive, skittish Isabella Linton is a particular delight. With the right crowd, it could make for a fun night out at the movies.

Yet for all the big swings, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” amounts to something oddly shallow and blunt: garish and stylized fan fiction with the scope and budget of an old-school Hollywood epic.

As Heathcliff, Elordi is certainly brooding, effectively passionate and surprisingly pro-consent, although it’s hard to accept the idea that he could pick up a grown woman by the corset string, as tantalizing a prospect as that might be. But for a character famous for his rage, there is little of that primal ferocity he showed so well through all those prosthetics in “Frankenstein.” As an actor, he was more unsettlingly toxic as Elvis.

This Heathcliff is mostly there to pine for, protect and punish Cathy. Fennell removes the racial component of Heathcliff’s otherness completely by casting Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton. Instead, Heathcliff is just an orphan from Liverpool with a chip on his shoulder.

Robbie plays her role as a kind of gothic Scarlett O’Hara, selfish, vain, vindictive and bored. Her most interesting moments are those in which she’s flustered by stirrings she doesn’t quite understand. It’s the only thing she can’t seem to control and manipulate.

There is also a conscious artificiality to the film, especially at the Grange. Costume designer Jacqueline Durran was beholden to no specific period and drew on all manner of inspiration to create the looks, including 1950s soundstage melodramas. The set design is a little absurd too — Catherine’s bedroom has been painted to match her skin color (moles and veins and all). It’s not uninteresting to look at, but as a storytelling aid, the surreal, pop art choices are often more distracting than additive. Is it a good thing if the audience is wondering why Catherine is wearing a cellophane dress for her wedding night? If that red skirt is latex (it’s not)? Or why all the white hands adorning the fireplace?

A disposition for provocation put Fennell on the map with “Promising Young Woman,” a colorfully subversive tale of revenge. “Saltburn” might have lost the plot in all the gleeful debauchery, but there’s usually at least a loose justification for everything she chooses to show — even a bathtub-slurping social climber.

In her own messy but literate way, she is exploring human capacity for vulgarity and, in turn, pushing mass audiences to the edge into a sometimes tantalizing, sometimes exhausting zone of entertainment and embarrassment. One might suspect that “crowd-pleasing” would be the greatest insult you could throw at her films; still, audiences seem to, well, lap them up. “Wuthering Heights” may also hit a nerve.

Fennell clearly has so many ideas swirling around, which is fitting for a story like “Wuthering Heights.” And yet as a viewing experience, it is an undernourishing feast, neither dangerous nor hot enough.

“Wuthering Heights,” a Warner Bros. release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “sexual content, some violent content and language.” Running time: 136 minutes. Two stars out of four.