Heathcliff. His name is the landscape and in Andrea Arnold’s adaptation, so is he – lying in muck or wind-raked grass, letting the rain beat him in the face.
Emily Brontë’s classic has rarely been treated right on small or big screens. Sold mostly as Jane Austen-style period drama (2009 TV Serial) or softened romance (1939 film), anyone smitten with the novel will tell you a film adaptation needs a strong dose of realism if it is to be anywhere near as affecting. Arnold is the first director to realise this, immediately elevating her film above all other Wuthering Heights made so far.
Apparently found on the streets of Liverpool, Heathcliff is adopted by Mr. Earnshaw and brought home to live with his family in the North Yorkshire moors. The book obscures Heathcliff’s origins although Brontë describes him as ‘gypsy’, something which no adaptation has yet taken on board. In this film, he is black, a feasible choice well followed through and one that reinforces the scorn set against him by Earnshaw’s son Hindley.
Close-ups of moths, dust, hair, beetles and clouds ground the story in earthy Yorkshire. Importantly though, this is a subjective realism – Heathcliff’s. The story follows him as if it were his story, with all the other characters appearing incidentally. This agenda is most clearly set out at the point where young Heathcliff leaves the moors after overhearing part of Cathy’s conversation with her maid. It is probably the most quoted dialogue of the book:
It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now*; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
The * is the point at which the hidden Heathcliff leaves for 3 years, returning only after amassing a great fortune. He never hears the following:
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind.
And in this film, neither do we. The camera follows Heathcliff out into the night as Cathy’s voice trails away.
This approach works very well indeed; the intimacy we acquire with the character promises an exciting final third. This is because, although Heathcliff is obviously a quiet and stoic character, what binds you to the book is the moments when he explodes out of his shell with the kind of melodrama only an introvert can hit. Unfortunately, at the film’s climax, these moments are either too tame or unconvincing. The unremarkable acting might have been hidden better by avoiding the proclamations of love lifted from the novel. These only highlighted the lack of passion in delivery.
However, there are good performances for the majority of the film. Especially noteworthy are the child actors who play young Cathy and Heathcliff; they manage to evoke the slow-growing sensuality between the young couple believably. All too often, other adaptations give a few shots of a boy and girl playing together before the young adults take over, suddenly emerging with a fully-fledged sexuality unearned by the previous scenes. This film does it properly, building the relationship from the roots of friendship, unashamedly showing the youngsters innocently aroused by horse rides or playfights in the mud, becoming slowly and naturally acquainted with their own adolescence.
The camerawork is well considered, hand-held a lot of the time (sometimes annoyingly so) but reining it in to simple mid-shots in all the right places. The establishing shots really capture the Yorkshire moors well – the best I’ve seen. My favourites are the wide shots of the Heights during strong gales where the camera seems to wuther with the wind (I can only think they achieved this by tying it to a tree somehow). Intelligent musical choice too – not to have any. Perfect. No story deserves a blank score more. If any future adaptation does manage to keep the story intimate, the setting isolate, and the characters believable, with music underscoring events, I will be more than impressed.
Overall, this is the best Wuthering Heights film so far. It isn’t perfect – the climax needed to be far more moving – but its realism and character development is second to none, so it is definitely the one that fans of the novel should go for.
Jon Bates Writes 