This new version of Wuthering Heights features Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in a visually dazzling but ultimately ambitiously misguided retelling of the story. No one is going to be able to fault writer/director Emerald Fennell for making this an opulent, ostentatious film, but that’s also an Achilles heel.
Here is a movie that focuses more on being a triumph of set design than on telling a story that will make younger audiences want to run out and read the book. It’s a movie not afraid to regurgitate its grandiosity in nearly every scene. But I digress.
Robbie stars as Catherine Earnshaw, living in a European city in 1771, when her alcoholic father takes in a young boy he rescued, and Catherine names him Heathcliff after her dead brother. The two are borderline inseparable, even when Heathcliff endures physical abuse at the cruel hands of Catherine’s father.
The adult versions are played by Robbie and Eordi, who is currently starring as the Monster in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Their home of Wuthering Heights is becoming dilapidated due to their father’s habits of drinking and gambling, but the one bright hope in Catherine’s life is her new love, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Heathcliff soon leaves the estate but returns and realizes his feelings for Catherine.
The rest of the movie plays like a bizarre soap opera of bizarre and erratic scenes especially with Catherine and Edgar’s marital moments. Heathcliff meets a mutual friend, Isabella (Alison Oliver), who happens to be Edgar’s ward.
Writer/director Fennell knows how to craft and construct the world of 18th-century Europe, filled with lavish Gothic sets and cinematography that oozes style, but she fails to strike a balance with its tone. The movie takes some severe liberties with its source material (which adaptation hasn’t?), but it’s sort of like its main female protagonist: It switches between scenes of unabashed melodrama and other scenes of sheer lunacy and camp.
Robbie and Eordi do what they can and are attractive in their roles, but it seems there’s much more emphasis on the look and style rather than the screenplay.
This version simply lacks the ability to create effective drama that matches the scope of its production. If the movie were more confident about its tone, then we’d have something. As it is, those looking for wacky, trashy fun might get something out of it in some scenes, but ultimately it’s a dull, bland film with no convincing structure to justify its existence.
Grade: C
(Rated R for sexual content, some violent content and language.)
Reviewer’s Note: I saw this movie at the Historic Strand in Jesup.
