A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Thursday, February 5, 2026

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)

James Howson in Wuthering Heights

Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Shannon Beer, James Howson, Solomon Glave, Oliver Milburn, Nichola Burley, James Northcote, Lee Shaw, Amy Wren, Steve Evets, Paul Hilton, Simone Jackson, Michael Hughes. Screenplay: Andrea Arnold, Olivia Hetreed, based on a novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Helen Scott. Film editing: Nicholas Chaudeurge. 

Andrea Arnold captures some of the feverishness of Emily Brontë's novel in her version of Wuthering Heights, but it's lost in some fashionable camerawork, and her actors aren't quite up to the demands of the characters. Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave provide some of the feral quality of the young Cathy and Heathcliff, but their adult counterparts, Kaya Scodelario and James Howson, don't have the abandon that the doomed lovers of the novel should have. When not called on to provide literal darkness to evoke the emotional darkness of the book, or punch up moments of conflict with a jiggly hand-held camera, cinematographer Robbie Ryan does capture the bleak environment of the story. The Brontë novel is probably unfilmable without lopping off large parts of the book, and Arnold stops short of the brutal last section about Heathcliff's destructive decline. There are some clumsy intrusions of contemporary language, words that would never have been allowed to appear in print at the time the book was published, and a few outright anachronisms, like "okay" and calling one's belongings "stuff." The film does a few things right, like casting Black actors as Heathcliff, but its chief problem is that it's more than a little dull.

Posted by
Links: , ,