Out on the Wiley, Windy Moors...

Before I embark on the following I should probably declare an interest or two. Firstly, I do have a favourite Bronte sister, and it isn’t Emily. In much the same way as George Harrison was my favourite Beatle, I always felt that Anne, an eloquent feminist ahead of her time, was the sister with probably the most profound contribution to make, and a mass of undervalued talent with which to make it, and who often goes sadly neglected in the shadow of her more crowd-pleasing big sisters. Secondly, I should admit that I’m actually not all that keen on Wuthering Heights which I always felt, though this sounds something of an oxymoron, managed against all odds to combine the eyebrow-raising, dramatic improbability of a Mills and Boon novel with the tedium of Jane Austen (sorry, Austen fans.) At the same time, though, the Yorkshire-bred, English graduate geek inside me was still intrigued by the hype of yet anothe Bronte adaptation, and eager to see if it worked.

Given my introduction above, perhaps it did, being every bit as tedious, far-fetched and unrelentingly bleak as the original. As far as the tedium is concerned, I was actually rather pleased that Andrea Arnold decided to sacrifice loyalty to the original and call it a day soon after Cathy’s untimely death, rather than several chapters and a few more births and deaths later, as Emily did. In terms of the story, then, it’s something of a disappointment if you’re a literary purist: aside from only including half the plot, it doesn’t actually include the character of Lockwood, which means it doesn’t include the ghost, which means, ultimately, it isn’t a ghost story, just a miserable and depressing one. It also does little to explore Heathcliff’s character. I assume this is a deliberate attempt to make him enigmatic, as he is in the book, but it doesn’t work: he comes across as resentful, hateful, and ultimately a bit of a fruitcake.

The main “character” in the film, according to some of the reviews, is the "landscape". This immediately put me off a bit, having endured endless lectures about “pathetic fallacy” throughout school and university – the Disneyfication of the landscape, where it is inevitably dark and stormy at key moments of drama, only for the sunshine to come out after the goodies win the day. Except that in Wuthering Heights, of course, the goodies never win, and consequently you’re treated to two hours of windswept desolation filmed at funny angles in bad light, Arnold presumably being one of those directors who thinks that constant semi-darkness somehow makes it all a bit more arty, whereas in fact it just means you can’t really make out what’s going on. I’m not trying to claim that Yorkshire is generally basking in a warm glow of sunbeams – I don’t think I’ve ever been to Haworth when it wasn’t drizzling – but a bit of seasonal let-up would’ve been nice. It’s implied that Cathy and Heathcliff, admittedly odd though they are, bonded over the awesomeness of their surroundings, and it makes sense that they would have thus bonded in a variety of weathers.
Yorkshire, looking characteristically gloomy. Pathetic fallacy, that.

Arnold takes other liberties, too. Most notably, she makes Heathcliff black. Much has been made of this, which is wholly plausible, and as far as I’m concerned really doesn’t matter much as the point is that Heathcliff is somehow "other", though the book seems to imply he is Asian or Middle Eastern (it’s claimed that his mother could have been an Indian Princess). It does however allow Arnold to chuck in some gratuitously racist terms which aren’t in the book, possibly for shock value more than anything else, accompanied as they are by several “fucks” and even the occasional “cunt”. Again, this isn’t implausible – both are good, old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon words and probably as common then as they still are on the football terraces of West Yorkshire – but whether it’s entirely necessary is a matter of opinion. While we’re on language, though, I was satisfied by the Yorkshire accents and (nerd alert) some of the language structure: devotees of Emily Bronte will note she writes in (to a reader often incomprehensibly phonetically-spelt) dialect with a pronounced West Yorkshire inflection, yet you’d be both amazed and amused by the clipped BBC radio announcer voices of the early adaptations, whose speakers have clearly never been any further north than Watford.

So, was there anything else I liked? Well, frankly, no, but as I’ve said that could partly be down to personal taste. For me the only moment of light relief came after a particularly jaw-dropping few moments of necrophilia, where Heathcliff breaks into Cathy’s room after she has apparently pined herself to death, and appears to have sex with her corpse. The lady in the seat next to me, who’d looked pretty unimpressed for the previous 90 minutes and had already expressed dismay a few minutes earlier when Heathcliff rather over-graphically hanged a puppy from a gatepost, turned to her companion in horror and exclaimed, perhaps louder than she intended: “That wasn’t in the book!”

Indeed it wasn’t. She left then and there, and a gruelling 30 minutes later so did everyone else, possibly toying with the idea of going to the screen next door to watch “We Need to Talk About Kevin” for a bit of light relief. I in turn went home and listened to Kate Bush, whose version of Wuthering Heights is about as accurate as the film while being mercifully briefer, and whose dancing and astounding vocal range are far more chilling than anything a backdrop of Yorkshire moorland could ever offer.

And finally, if you got to the end of this clunky review, here is your reward: (about a minute in) Monty Python's "Wuthering Heights in Semaphore"