Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie star in “Wuthering Heights.” (Warner Bros. Pictures)
By Isabella Cantillano-Sanchez
Director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s enduring Gothic novel will prove as divisive as her past work, but she has always been a filmmaker that favors empty controversy over anything that truly shakes the table. Her debut film, “Promising Young Woman,” an attempted subversion of the rape-revenge genre, leaves its heroine dead and justice in the hands of men in law enforcement. Her second film “Saltburn” is ostensibly meant to be class commentary, but its twists blur its message beyond comprehension. Therefore, it is not surprising that the themes of classism and racism in Brontë’s novel go thoroughly unexamined in this film. After all, Fennell has proven herself disinterested in anything beyond tepid sexual provocation throughout her career.
This adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” like most before it, forgoes the second half of the novel in favor of focusing only on the first. The film follows Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), childhood sweethearts torn apart by Cathy’s decision to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Her comfortable life in her new home alongside Edgar’s eccentric ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) and Nelly (Hong Chau), her companion since childhood, is shattered when Heathcliff returns after years spent away. He swears revenge, and the lives of everyone in the Linton household are changed forever.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fennell said: “I think the thing is everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it. I don’t know, I think I was focusing on the pseudo-masochistic elements of it.”
This quote, and the admission within it that she could only envision Heathcliff as a white man despite multiple references to the contrary in the novel, only becomes more damning when one notices her casting of non-white actors in roles that place them in direct opposition to the romance between her two white leads. Fennell’s imagination could seemingly only conjure up the existence of people of color that exist outside of the romantic and sexual fantasy she crafts around Cathy and Heathcliff.
As for the “pseudo-masochistic elements,” Cathy and Heathcliff are both too underdeveloped as characters for this to be explored beyond surface level expressions of sexuality that feel oddly tame in comparison to the excess present everywhere else in the film. Fennell’s most explicit exploration of masochism is through Isabella’s relationship with Heathcliff. An abusive marriage that Isabella flees in the novel is transformed into a consensual BDSM dynamic, a decision as bizarre as it is stupid. Regressiveness masquerading as edginess seems to be Fennell’s oeuvre. Like in “Saltburn,” the lower class in “Wuthering Heights” are depicted as sexual deviants whereas the wealthy are repressed victims.
Adaptations need not follow their source material exactly, but it seems odd to abandon the core themes of a work you claim to love. Fennell’s dedication to aestheticism over anything else likely doomed her interpretation of a story as thematically dense as “Wuthering Heights” from the start, but her casting and writing decisions cross the line from harmlessly shallow to insidious.
