For much of “Wuthering Heights,” a film adaptation of the revered 1847 novel of the same name by Emily Brontë, written and directed by Emerald Fennell (“Saltburn,” “Promising Young Woman”), doomed lovers Cathy and Heathcliff behave like the worst version of the most insufferable couple you knew in college.
You know the one. Always the two hottest people in any room, and always on the verge of breaking up or declaring their undying love for one another, while smashing beer bottles on the ground if one of them so much as looked at another person, regardless of their current relationship status. And for a while, as a spectator, you find it entertaining. It’s all anyone can talk about. You outwardly groan and roll your eyes when they walk into the local bar, but you’re secretly thrilled to watch the night unfold. But that energy isn’t sustainable — for the couple, or for those watching. You can only stomp out of a room or across a swirling, misty moor so many times.
The same can be said of “Wuthering Heights.”
Fennell has discussed the film extensively in advance, emphasizing she was only capable of making the movie based on her own perception when she read the book as a teenager — a thesis that makes a lot of sense given what’s on screen. At its core, and at its pinnacle, it’s a visual ode to an all-consuming romance. It’s noticing the freckle on someone’s cheek and remembering their scars as your own. It’s feeling like you’re seeing the world in color for the first time. (And oh, those colors are magnificent. Costume designer Jacqueline Durran as well as the production design and art directing teams have given the Yorkshire moors and alleys and halls of England the Candyland treatment, to our great benefit.) But overall, it’s a bit flat, as if we’ve been given a Viewfinder or a flipbook and we’re left to fill in the gaps.
Maybe that’s beside the point, though. As Cathy and Heathcliff, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi bring the wanton desire and ravenous nature befitting these (fairly monstrous, at times) characters. (You just know a frat party would hate to see them coming, and they would never get their rental deposit back.)
What Elordi lacks in adherence to some of the novel’s physical descriptions, he more than makes up for in presence, infusing his brooding Heathcliff with a deep longing for more, never bothering to hide — and often showcasing — the sizable chip on his shoulder. His scenes with Alison Oliver’s Isabella, his eventual wife and the ward to Cathy’s husband, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif, garnering all our sympathies), are pleasurably shocking. Elordi knows just how to weaponize his height — lingering in doorways, lifting Robbie by her corset strings — his smile and, yes, his tarty little gold earring and tooth. Oliver, in her own right, gives the film a jolt of energy whenever she’s on screen.
Robbie has, arguably, the tougher hill to climb. We know she’s a gifted actress, especially skilled at volleying from humor to devastation with nothing more than a slight change in facial expression or perfectly timed fall from atop a wall. She’s an exceptional canvas for the art on display. But the movie and Fennell’s direction abandon her at critical points, treating her as a doll (a theme throughout), or a plaything which we’re incapable of seeing beneath the surface. She’s dressed up and moved from room to room without much of a purpose. The always-welcome Hong Chau as Nelly, Cathy’s companion since childhood, gives Robbie an additional sparring partner, but there’s still a remove, a barrier, that the film struggles to overcome.
This is an abridged adaptation, equal parts understandable and baffling. If you’ve read the book, you probably have a good sense of where the film chooses to end. Robbie and Elordi play these moments with great care and emotion, aided by several genuinely moving callbacks to their time together as children. It can’t quite salvage the movie as a whole, but it’s an affecting, devastating moment to end on.
And it’s nice to have hot people on screen being hot together. I don’t say that lightly or glibly. There’s been a dearth, in recent years, of onscreen lust and passion, replaced, instead, with empty noise machines and extended cinematic universes and neuroses masquerading as flirting. “Wuthering Heights” brings the heat — even if it can’t quite justify why it lit the match in the first place.
“Wuthering Heights” is playing at The Little Theatre now.
Johanna Lester is a pop culture critic who mainlines movies, TV and the best cookies Rochester has to offer. She’ll also hold that grudge on your behalf. Follow her @theauntjojo.
