"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" - no stars

Wuthering Heights does not work on its own terms because Emerald Fennell does not pick a lane, because she has no good original ideas, and because she has no cinematic taste. She thinks she’s daring and transgressive but actually she’s just crass and juvenile and undercuts any attempts her actors are making to inject credibility or elicit sympathy from the audience. Hong Chau is good as Nelly and Jacob Elordi tries hard as Heathcliff in a straight drama. Isabella is played for broad knowing laughs in a second separate film. Martin Clunes is playing a Dickensian villain in a third. Margot Robbie is just too old and haggard to play Cathy at any age. She has Ozempic face and she’s not even on Ozempic. Unkind - but she produced this bullshit and starred in it and thus wasted my time. Ultimately though this is Fennell’s failure. I laughed at the screen when Clunes died amidst two piles of empty gin bottles. I laughed harder when Atlanta was burning. We get it Emerald. You watched Gone With The Wind and Rebecca. Now please do fuck off. 

Wuthering Heights REALLY does not work as an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s actually transgressive novel. The juvenile absurd emotions turned up to eleven revenge psychodrama that Cathy and Heathcliff put each other through only makes sense when you know they are adolescents - when Cathy dies at 20. The idea that marrying Heathcliff would degrade Cathy only works when money won’t wash over his “otherness” because he is either the son of a black slave or a lascar. There is no evidence in the book that they fucked. It’s not a love story. It’s a story of psychosexual sadism carried over three generations. Eliminating Hindley means we have no Hindley Heathcliff Cathy triad to mirror the Edgar Heathcliff Cathy triad. 

Of course Emerald Fennell is narcissistic enough to think we give a shit about how SHE felt reading the novel at 14 and that the book is unfilmable. But Andrea Arnold made a superb film of the first half off this book. And I hate to break it to you Emerald, we watch this because of Bronte not you. 

 And don’t even get me going on a deeply privileged white woman blathering on in press tours about how this is a female made movie as if this allows her to erase the fact that the lead actor should be a person of colour and that the entire story is about him being diminished for being brown. And then - just to add insult to injury - Margot Robbie parading jewelry stolen from Mughal India and ascribing its ownership to Liz Taylor - erasing its actual origin. Either they are racist or stupid. 

WUTHERING HEIGHTS" is rated R and has a running time of 136 minutes.