Wuthering Heights

My mother always told me the movie is never better than the book. Well. What's the easiest path to violating that rule? Take a shitty book. Make a movie that's sort of inspired by it but is really a whole different beast. All you have to do is make an average movie to transcend a shitty book.

The other option is distilling the perfections out of the book and only filming those (Godfather, 2001, etc). Fennell took the easier route. Wuthering Heights is a quivering story -- it's not hard to imagine a raptured atmosphere for the cinema, nor imagine a more emotionally satisfying focus on Catherine and Heathcliff.

That's one of the most obvious ways to generate something enjoyable out of this book: focus on Catherine and Heathcliff. In the book, she's dead before the halfway point, and it makes little emotional sense. Their relationship is one of the best things about the book. Fennell makes it her cornerstone, and corrupts it along the way, but at least she has a cornerstone onto which the audience's heart can lean. The book is utterly bereft.

She corrupts it by taking its most basic romantic interpretation: that they really love each other, in the normal Hollywood way. That's not so in the book, whatever people might say about Catherine's "I am Heathcliff!" speech. Heathcliff is too close to being a twin brother in Catherine's eyes, in the book. I don't think she ever really loves him in this straightforward way. The movie makes Heathcliff appealing, and makes Catherine love him like a basic romance novel.

That's another obvious way to generate something enjoyable out of the book: make Heathcliff appealing. He's a menace in the book, and it makes little emotional sense. In the movie he's "rough and wild", which have positive sexual connotations these days, especially when you cast a heartthrob. You might say Wuthering Heights as a book is a romance, of the romantic period, but the movie is a severe romanticization. It makes the book feel distinctly unromantic.

Heathcliff is more appealing than his literary counterpart, although thankfully Jacob Elordi is just odd enough looking that Heathcliff isn't a total slobber. But his hair, voice, and presence are solid. I like the way he speaks -- it's very Jon Snow, super breathy and deep and chokes out whole syllables in that northerner's way. The last scene also makes a statement that Heathcliff is not a villain, which is a betrayal of the book, but a pleasant one.

As for Catherine, Margot Robbie was a decent choice, although I don't think this will go down as one of her important performances. She's quite restrained compared to Babylon, Wolf of Wall Street, and (I must assume) Harley Quinn... which is fine, but she spends most of her time crying or moaning. She's missing a lot of that vibrance from her other roles. That spark. I think she plays it well though. The source gives her a meager foothold, and she transcends it. Catherine is not a very good character in literature, but Robbie looks like she should look, so Robbie is a decent choice to do a better version of the character.

Differences from the book: Catherine and Heathcliff are much more straightforwardly and zestily romantic, the movie ends at Catherine's death (which is not even half of the book), Catherine's dad is despicable, the setting is fantastical, Nelly is less heroic, Catherine does not have a baby (the baby is critical to the novel).

I thought the movie was decent. The atmosphere and visuals were pretty cool. The love story was fine -- maybe I would have liked it better if I didn't already have such a distaste for the characters from the book. I also knew roughly how it would end, so there was no roller coaster. I could see that story being full-hearted without the context of the novel. As is, it pales in comparison to Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre hit me hard back in college, in the way Wuthering Heights (the movie at least) tries to hit you. Though I kind of liked the Wuthering Heights movie, Jane Eyre is easily the winner in my mind, as far as the stories themselves go.

I don't think I realized this before: it's so strange that within ~6 months Jacob Elordi has played two monsters of Frankenstein, after a fashion, in adaptations of gothic novels I hated. Heathcliff is a very Frankenstein's-monster sort of character in the novel. Oddly parallel that he should take both roles. You might think that endears me to him, that he's reading the books I'm reading, but I didn't like these books, so I wouldn't take on these roles. Nevertheless, he's doing a fair job.