Wuthering Heights (2011)
First screened in December 2012 / Most recently screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Andrea Arnold. Cast: Solomon Glave, Shannon Beer, James Howson, Kaya Scodelario, Nichola Burley, Simone Jackson, Lee Shaw, Paul Hilton, Steve Evets, Amy Wren, James Northcote, Eve Coverley, Oliver Milburn, Emma Ropner, Jonathan Powell, Adam Lock, Michael Hughes, Paul Murphy. Screenplay: Andrea Arnold and Olivia Hetreed (based on the novel by Emily Brontë).

 Twitter Capsule: (2012) Dour, statically self-regarding naturalism misses Brontë's pagan turmoil and eerie necrophilia until strong end.

In Brief: (2024) Same grade, new reasons. Mixed dividends throughout. Environment a consistent strength, character a weak spot.

VOR: ③  Gutsy concepts (bold casting, Ryan on the moors, Arnold mussing the Canon) can yield mixed results. Interesting, though. A godsend for syllabi.


   
Photo © 2011 UK Film Council / Film 4 / Écosse Films/
HanWay Films / Screen Yorkshire / Goldcrest Films;
© 2012 Oscilloscope Pictures
Andrea Arnold came late to this adaptation after at least two other directors came and went, along with their big-name casts and technical teams. Even so, this Wuthering Heights feels every bit like Arnold's autonomous undertaking, with all of the glories, qualms, and unresolvable debates that tend to attach to her work.

Arnold collaborates again here with such vital associates as cinematographer Robbie Ryan, editor Nicolas Chaudeurge, and future Sound of Metal sound designer Nicolas Becker (big Nick Energy on this thing!). That squad evinces once again their indisputable command of tactile audio and imagery; of natural lighting, captured at precise indexes of light to dark and warmth to chill; of a camera that feels as robustly corporeal as any of the actors but is also, somehow, guardedly observational; and of cutting rhythms that feel yanked along by the characters' hormones and impulses, then slowed down by their moments of torpor or disorientation. As ever, Arnold pulls you into a potent multi-sensory environment; I felt myself sniffling from the onscreen damp, reaching to wipe smudges of phantom mud from my face. All of these craftspeople meet or, in Ryan's case, exceed their own high standards, and the direction bears always the fingerprint of a distinct and commanding artist. (Props, too, to the costume designs of Steven Noble, an Arnold newbie and a versatile talent who's been all but AWOL since 2018.)

It's open to reasonable debate, though, whether all these abiding proclivities of Arnold's have tipped, after three shorts and three features, into a network of rigid habits, ringed by a penumbra of outright tics: cutaways to thistly flora and to flying birds, chaotic handheld pursuits of mid-sprint protagonists, moody shot/reverse passages that amount to staring contests, etc. I'm here for it! But I also notice how often I've been here, rather like Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit arriving endlessly at the same pit in the Hundred Acre Wood no matter how often they strike out in what they intend as a different direction.

For sure, Wuthering Heights stands out from Arnold's prior features in some measurable ways: her only adaptation, her only period piece, her only contact with characters of means (inevitably causing friction with those who aren't, though it's hard to draw a precise graph of social class in this story). She risked a lot by scaling this mountain, or this moor, and her sensibility is so pronounced that just by filtering Brontė through it, we get a different angle on the text. The smallness of the characters against their environment comes through more here than in other adaptations (despite a 1.33:1 aspect ratio that's often consumed by the actors' heads), as does the rapidity with which functional relations and upward trajectories go wildly south. Aging, betrayal, departure, return, provisional acculturation, and plotted revenge transpire over months and years but feel at times like blinks of an eye. Desires are gratified and then shattered seemingly overnight, despite this 113-minute feature refusing to rush.

Sometimes this all feels to me like a weirdly cursory hustle through an intricate and deeply felt plot; screen time allotted to buzzing moths and dripping foliage might surely have been allocated to serve story and characterization more explicitly. Sometimes, though, this Wuthering Heights feels like a bravely ruthless exercise in compressing a tale of multi-generational sprawl, subordinating its human time span and self-centered passions to the much grander time scale of nature's indifferent, overwhelming persistence.

Sometimes I lamented that Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer, the young first-timers playing Heathcliff and Cathy in childhood, make more durable impressions than James Howson and Kaya Scodelario, who assay the same people in early adulthood. Sometimes I appreciated that, wittingly or not, this Wuthering Heights sees the conscious machinations and power plays of grown folks as inadequate ripostes to the lusts, jealousies, inequities, and other patterns laid down in childhood.

Sometimes I gladly luxuriated in another of Andrea Arnold's haptic environments, with sopping peat and stable smells and rough-hewn masonry subbing in for the cracked asphalt and graffitied concrete more prevalent in her oeuvre. Sometimes I pined for a bit more novelistic insight and intricacy.

And so, like the hard-willed and improvident lovers they present to us, Arnold and Brontė clasp at each other and repel each other. They suggest at once a deep if unexpected communion of souls and a pair of differently histrionic spirits who are only half-trying to reach across their inalienable differences—laden as they are with the power and burden of their isolating uniqueness, the heavy task of being their impressive but sometimes inflexible selves. Grade: B–

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Awards:
Venice Film Festival: Best Technical Contribution (Robbie Ryan, cinematography)
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