for ‘Tribune’: WUTHERING HEIGHTS [7/10] – UK release 11 November

Published on: November 9th, 2011

Wuthering Heights
Director: Andrea Arnold

“F-CK you all, c-nts!” barks Heathcliff (James Howson) at a fraught juncture during Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (out now) - language that obviously couldn’t have been printed in Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, but which one can imagine being hurled around remote Yorkshire farmsteads earlier the same century. Heathcliff’s bluntly uncouth vocabulary is all of a piece with Arnold’s boldly confrontational approach, one which makes Cary Fukunaga’s recent, Gothic-flavoured Jane Eyre look as conventional as Hollywood’s 1943 version starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.

Eschewing star names, Arnold instead foregrounds untried non-professionals such as Howson, plus Solomon Glave – who plays the teenage Heathcliff, and Shannon Beer, his rosy-cheeked paramour Cathy (Howson and Glave are black, a casting-decision justified by Brontë’s descriptions of a dark-skinned, ‘Lascar-like’ Heathcliff.). The pair’s socially-controversial, ill-fated relationship has become an excessively familiar story thanks to numerous screen adaptations (even Luis Buñuel had a go) and Kate Bush’s freakish 1979 hit-single, but actually only takes up the first half of Brontë’s sprawling book.

Arnold and Olivia Hetreed’s script here is similarly truncated, but in almost every other regard the film provides radically fresh and original takes on the material. And even if not all the gambits prove successful (the deployment of a Mumford & Sons track in the final moments is the clumsiest mis-step), it’s nevertheless heartening to witness such departures from the usual deadly-dull run of period costume-dramas and reverently ossified transpositions of classic literature.

Elementally atmospheric, Arnold’s Wuthering Heights features stunningly impressive digital cinematography from Robbie Ryan – as with Arnold’s Fish Tank (2008), Ryan deploys the boxy ‘Academy’ screen-ratio, one which proves surprisingly suited to the windblown vistas of hilly northern England. And as befits a picture which is emphatically made from free-spirit Heathcliff’s perspective, the camera displays a Malick-esque fascination with flora and fauna, minutely inspecting all inhabitants of this damply enticing landscape.

Those squeamish about brutal language, violence and racism – as endured by Howson/Glave as the cruelly-abused hero-cum-villain – may blanch. But Arnold has crafted a Wuthering Heights that Bush, Buñuel and perhaps even Brontë herself would surely recognise and embrace.

Neil Young
7th November, 2011
written for Tribune magazine