"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" **

"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 - problematically - 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. 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 and direct music videos. 

"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 gypsy or a lascar. There is no evidence in the book that they ever had sex. 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 or the Hareton-Heathcliff-Cathy2 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 or both. 

WUTHERING HEIGHTS" is rated R and has a running time of 136 minutes.  It gets a star for Hong Chau and a star for Martin Clunes. 

More thoughts: Heathcliff’s continual demand of consent from Isabella was deeply troubling. A joke, played for recognition. But also part of the overall softening of Heathcliff and Cathy - to make them “likeable” and credible as a love story gone wrong. Young Cathy isn’t pinching and punching staff. Heathcliff doesn’t kill Isabella’s dogs. Eliminating the back half of the book makes Heathcliff a lot less violent and indeed borderline necro. I also feel that making Cathy’s baby die early in the womb so that Cathy then dies of septicaemia is a way for Emerald to keep Cathy/Robbie looking “pretty” and unpregnant to the end. It allows Cathy and Heathcliff to keep pretending that they are starcrossed lovers in arrested development.  Emerald can’t handle them being culpable adults as much as they can’t.

THE MENU***

My cousin announced she was getting married in Lisbon and as my husband and I hadn't been to Portugal for decades we thought we would make an extended holiday out of it, planning a road trip by picking every single Michelin one and two star restaurant along the way for dinner every night bar the wedding, starting in Faro and ending in Porto.  We are the greedy capitalist bastards, where the dishes become a blur, that have apparently sucked the joy out of cooking and life for celebrity chefs like the fictional Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).

As a result, he lures a privileged few diners to his remote island restaurant for an epic tasting menu that will fully express his nihilism and totalitarian control of both staff and diners.  If you have the audacity to ask for mere bread, his maitre d, Elsa (Hong Shau) simply says "no".  Every course is exquisitely described and reveals yet more about the contempt in which the diners are held. And so we come to the inevitable horror-comedy conclusion.

For me, this is a superb social satire cum black comedy that takes the piss out of people like me. It comes as no surprise that it was written by two late night comedy writers - Will Tracy (Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) and Seth Reiss (Late Night With Seth Myers). There is a spareness to the comedy that is devastating. And the over-fussiness of the menu seems absolutely spot on.  Mark Mylod (Succession) directs with a cool deadpan tone and kudos to all involved in the production design.  The performances are uniformly good BUT Hong Chau is the stand-out in expressing the cult-like status of these chefs and the rigidity of their approach to actually enjoying food. It's kind of nuts to me that Anya Taylor-Joy has been nominated for a Golden Globe rather than Chau, who deserves awards not just for this but also her performance in THE WHALE. What a year she had in 2022.

However, while I do think the film is worth watching, well-made, and funny, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was a really good 60-minute episode of Black Mirror rather than a feature film: a high concept comedy that couldn't sustain its runtime. 

THE MENU has a running time of 107 minutes, is rated R, played Toronto 2022, and is available to stream.

THE WHALE - BFI Lndon Film Festival 2022 - Day 7

In all my years of attending the BFI London Film Festival I have experienced three standing ovations. The first was joyous, riotous applause for WHIPLASH. The second was, I felt, performative, and was for 12 YEARS A SLAVE. The third was last night for Brendan Fraser, in Darren Aronofsky's THE WHALE. 

To be sure, the audience cheered wildly for him even before the film. Perhaps this reflected an acknowledgement of everything he has been through over the past decade, and a warm gratitude that he's simply back.  Perhaps it reflected anticipation for a performance that has been widely and warmly reviewed. But I've never seen anything like the flood of warmth that rolled over the auditorium and toward Fraser before a single scene had been shown. His humility, gratitude, and awkwardness was evident.

Once the film was done, the audience stood and applauded Fraser, who alongside director Aronofsky and playwright Samuel D Hunter, had been watching with us.  Fraser moved slowly through the hall toward the stage once again, evidently moved to tears, as he had moved us to tears. He shook hands with members of the audience and when he reached the stage he took a long, deep, bow.  This is a profound moment for him, and one that is richly deserved.

I say all this to explain what happened last night - the shared communal experience of intense emotion - as an example of cinema at its finest. When a work of art can profoundly move.  I did not cry during the film, though many did. I cried seeing Fraser's reaction to our outpouring of love. 

This film is one that is so full of humanity it can feel overwhelming. A film so full of hope and empathy and persistent attempts at connection that it is incredibly uplifting. And the entire cast is outstanding.  Brendan Fraser wears heavy prosthetics to play Charlie, an online university teacher who is dealing with grief by over-eating to the point of being close to death.  He is clear-sighted, sure of his intentions, and even when confronted with crass attempts at religious redemption retains his calm patience.  Charlie is trying to reconnect with his daughter Ellie - a whipsmart, angry, fierce teenage girl portrayed by Stranger Things' Sadie Sink in what surely must be her breakout cinematic performance.  This attempt at reconciliation is eventually rumbled by Ellie's mother Mary (Samantha Morton) - a woman we think is going to be angry and mean, but is actually kind and hurt and damaged but still full of love, just like her daughter and just like Charlie and just like his best friend, Liz.  How wonderful to see Hong Chau back on our screens in a role befitting her talent, so far from the caricatured role in DOWNSIZING.  Liz sees herself as Charie's protector and guardian from anything that might cause pain in his final days, not least a young missionary played by Ty Simpkins.

What follows is a film that is raw, honest, darkly funny and thought-provoking.  Its subject matter is the hypocrisy and cruelty of religion; the way in which people self-medicate to handle rejection, anger and grief; and the need for authentic, honest, brave communication. Every character is using some form of drug to cope with life, whether Charlie's compulsive eating, Liz' smoking, Mary's drinking or the kids smoking pot. This is a film that says life is rough, but better to face it truthfully and to have the courage to let love in.  All of that is encapsulated in the performance of a liftetime from Fraser - a performance of bravery, nuance and good humour - and one that deeply connected with the audience. 

THE WHALE has a running tie of 117 minutes It played Venice and Toronto 2022 and is playing the BFI London Film Festival It will be released in the USA on December 9th.