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| Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in "Wuthering Heights" |
Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell, Amy Morgan, Jessica Knappett, Charlotte Mellington, Owen Cooper, Vy Nguyen. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell, based on a novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis.
I am not a teenage girl, which means that my particular sensibility may hinder me from fully appreciating what Emerald Fennell has done with Emily Brontë's great mad novel, Wuthering Heights. Fennell said that she approached making a film of the novel as if it were being imagined by a teenage girl who had just read the book. She also did something of which I wholeheartedly approve: She put the title in quotation marks because movies and literature are distinctly different media -- no film, however closely it sticks to the source, is the equivalent of a written work. And on those terms, I have to applaud Fennell's movie: It does what it sets out to do. Sometimes at the expense of taste, to be sure: Any movie that starts with an ejaculating corpse is going to have to justify itself, and "Wuthering Heights" never quite recovers from that scene. The scene in which Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) finds Cathy (Margot Robbie) masturbating on the moors, her flesh-colored room at Thrushcross Granger, and her strapless mourning dress continue to push the boundaries of audacity. But the movie benefits from Fennell's decision to go all the way and from its cast's willingness to follow her. This is, in short, one of those movies that are better appreciated if you haven't read the book on which it's based: Brontë's novel is not a paperback bodice-ripper (the covers of which Fennell copies to the point of parody). The film is a sometimes campy but occasionally tedious exercise in excess.
