I went into the “Wuthering Heights” movie with genuine hope, defending its premise to anyone who would listen. So imagine my despair when the movie failed to deliver.
The novel follows Catherine and Heathcliff, starcrossed lovers.
The characters are quite young through the entire novel, meeting at 6 when Catherine’s family brings Heathcliff, an orphan, into their home. Heathcliff escaped at 16, Catherine married at 17 and had her first kid by 18.
Heathcliff is lower class, heavily described as being a person of color. He faces many abuses from Catherine’s Family, which eventually turned him into a brutal, vicious person.
Catherine marries another man, which spurs Heathcliff into becoming a man of riches in order to spite her and others. In the novel, we are taken through their horrid relationship. He treats her horribly, as people have treated him, and she loves him anyway.
Catherine dies in the middle of the novel, allowing for a further character arc for Heathcliff. It’s something of a divine punishment for his brutalities. It is a story about loving someone in spite of their wrongdoing, and what a world of prejudice can turn someone into.
The book has far more substance in its first two chapters than this two hour movie could dream of. The movie is too long, yet it is unable to tell the story effectively.
I knew this movie would not be delivering an honest retelling, or period accurate anything, but I thought I would at least get the undying devotion, romance, true tragedy and by-the-book masochism. The movie has Catherine die at the end, which in turn means Heathcliff gets zero growth.
The movie is beautiful, sure. Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliff, is stunning and the acting is well done, but it’s all empty. Robbie and Elordi might also be too old to be playing 18-year-olds. The actors’ age makes their childish behavior all the more insufferable.
The film is pretty just for the sake of being so. To me, it fails to leave its mark in the history of “Wuthering Heights” for being anything other than bad taste and pretty stills.
I wanted the movie to be more about the actual intimacies of masochistic sex between two truly damaged people — not about motifs, and symbolisms of sex in every objectively un-sexy thing. It was freaky in all the wrong ways.
I think the movie’s storytelling is subpar, which is saying a lot since the story already exists. The cinematography is great, but the movie is too long to have so little going on. Also, there was not enough Charli XCX — I wanted to hear her influence every time music played. I didn’t.
Also, why is everyone but Heathcliff allowed to be a person of color? In the book, Heathcliff is described as a person of color on multiple occasions. This provides systematic implications for why everyone treats him so poorly and why, in turn, he acts so viciously.
In the movie, Heathcliff is a poor boy who is abused by his father figure, but Catherine is abused in the same way, and their cruel actions are to similar degrees in the movie which defeats the major theme of the book — loving someone despite their wrongs. Both of them are equally horrible to each other and everyone else for no reason besides a poor childhood.
Heathcliff in the novel is as cruel as he is because his abuse is inescapable. It’s not merely his father figure, it’s the skin he lives in and the station that he’s born in that condemns him to torment.
If you want to look at something pretty, see Elordi be mildly freaky and lots of aesthetic color choices, go see the movie. If you want to see something romantic, tragic, and with the substance of the novel — particularly a layered tragedy based on the abuses society deals to its most marginalized, and how love can still grow despite this — skip it.
