FIND MOVIES
Movie List
Loading ...
or
Find Theaters and Movie Times
or
Search Movies

Review: Wuthering Heights [2012]

Tough love
By PETER KEOUGH  |  October 19, 2012
3.0 3.0 Stars



Merchant-Ivory this is not. Nor is it any Emily Brontë we've seen before, except maybe in Luis Buñuel's wild Mexican rendition, Abismos de pasión (1954). Instead, Andrea Arnold distills the great novel into a flinty essence, creating a work that is the 19th-century Yorkshire version of her modern-day urban wastelands in films like Red Road and Fish Tank. She is equally ruthless with Brontë's prose, eliminating most of the original dialogue. Nonetheless, the film achieves its own harsh beauty and begrudging pathos.

More storm-battered than otherworldly, the moors here sprawl out like a mossy lunar landscape, and the mucky, ramshackle homestead of the title, where the patriarch Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) takes in the foundling Heathcliff, looks like the setting for the mud-gathering scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Natural beauty abounds, but so does natural cruelty, like the casual slaughter of animals, including puppies hung from a fence. It's a godforsaken place that suits Arnold's style, as she tells the story with images and sound edited into a dreamlike flow that evokes the subjective passage of time.

She also emphasizes Heathcliff's feral nature and the contempt and abuse he receives from his jealous adoptive brother, Hindley, and from snobby Edgar Linton of the posh neighboring estate. Underscoring the outsider's pariah status, Arnold casts two black actors, Solomon Glave and James Howson, to play the younger and older versions, with race added to as a stigma. This strategy works especially well with the younger edition of the character, as Glave's scenes with Earnshaw's pre-adolescent daughter Catherine (Shannon Beer) — who treats him at first as an exotic animal — develop an innocent eroticism. It's the closest that the film gets to being pastoral.

But Heathcliff flees when Catherine gets gussied up for the wealthy Lintons, returning years later with a mysterious fortune. His desire for her has not ebbed, nor hers for him, even though she has since married the toffee-nosed Edgar (James Northcote). Regrettably, whatever elemental passion the two younger actors tapped in these characters eludes their successors (James Howson and Kaya Scodelario). But Arnold has not lost any of her inspiration; a scene in which Heathcliff collapses in grief by a gnarly tree is an epiphany of despair. Unfortunately, the tree steals the scene. No matter; Arnold's film remains a compelling evocation of injustice and destructive love.

>> READ MORE: Peter Keough's interview with director Andrea Arnold <<

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough@thephoenix.com

  Topics: Reviews , review, film, Andrea Arnold,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   REVIEW: WHITE ZOMBIE  |  February 12, 2013
    This Kino Classics release is worth it if only for historical purposes, since it demonstrates that from the start zombie films embodied the Marxist paradigm of capitalism (Lugosi) versus labor (zombies).
  •   REVIEW: BEAUTIFUL CREATURES  |  February 11, 2013
    Throughout his adaptation of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's YA novel, Richard Lagravenese drops the names of books that would have provided a more rewarding way of spending a couple of hours than watching this movie.
  •   LAST ACTION HEROES?  |  February 05, 2013
    Maybe it was the moment in The Last Stand when a guy exploded, or the scene when Arnold sawed someone in half with a Vickers machine gun, or maybe it was the 10th brain-splattering bullet to the head in Sylvester Stallone's Bullet to the Head .
  •   REVIEW: SIDE EFFECTS  |  February 08, 2013
    Ironically, the filmmaker who started his career with sex, lies, and videotape , a film boosting female sexuality and empowerment, now ends it with a so-so thriller that resorts to the same old misogyny.
  •   REVIEW: HORS SATAN  |  January 30, 2013
    God works in strange ways, especially when Bruno Dumont directs him. Or is that the devil?

 See all articles by: PETER KEOUGH