Wuthering Heights

[GCAcademic]

Anyone planning to see this? From the trailer I was expecting it to be marmite and not in any way a straight adaptation of the novel, but the reviews I've seen so far are universally uncomplimentary. I'd already booked to see it, so will go in with an open mind!

I absolutely love the book it’s my favourite

but I wouldn’t call it an enjoyable read and one that stayed with me for sometime I was desperate to finish it but missed it once I had (have felt this about other books too just not quite on the same way). It’s not an easy read (took me a few goes to get into the story), few characters are likeable and a complex story and narration but I have never read a book where I felt so transported to the place and time the setting is so much part of the story

the film is an easy watch by comparison so can understand why the preference and the story has been softened

I know a few people who have really disliked the book (often listed on overhyped/most hated books)

Jessie Buckley would have made a good Cathy I think. Jacob Elordi I felt was a bit wooden here and was more suited to his role in Saltburn but there was definite chemistry between them. Martin Clunes was great.

Martin Clunes WAS great! I hope Hollywood comes calling for him in other roles.

i loved it. I also wish they’d used a more traditional house. I did a walk past wuthering house. There was no need to change it. (Have read the book. Don’t get an A )

I found myself wondering about Emily Brontë's state of mind when reading the book. Imagine sitting on a lonely moor and coming up with that!

I thought it was good. It wasn't great.

The way it opened was very clever. And my highlights were the children (who were excellent and very well cast) and Martin Clunes.

Isabella felt like a caricature. And was it just me that thought the actors were much too old for the characters? Cathy was still a teenager when she died. But I suppose they'll excuse that by saying it wasn't a traditional adaptation.

This is definitely not a film I'll watch again.

Why not go and see it?

There's a line (Martin Clunes says I think) about Cathy being an old spinster so I am guessing they might have pitched her in her 20s.

I thought MR was all wrong for the role but she is very beautiful, so an easy watch - and quite lucky she didn't inherit her screen father's teeth!

That’s been the case with pretty much every adaptation, though. Apart from the Andrea Arnold one where Kaya Scodelario was 19 playing Cathy.

I think Orla Brady was in her late 30s at least when playing her in an ITV film from the 90s, about which I remember only that Matthew McFadyen was Hareton and Crispin ‘Mr Bingley’ Bonham-Carter was Edgar.

I don't think that what has gone before should be used as justification for decisions made about the current adaptation. They would be no point in adapting something if they are just going to follow what has already been done.

I’ve just re read it in the light of some of the comments on the film.

I do think heathcliff might have sexually abused Isabella… otherwise why did she become pregnant? Obviously something happened shortly after her marriage which so appalled her, she couldn’t write it down/speak of it.

Well, then, this current adaptation does what virtually every previous one has done. It cuts the second generation, artificially inflates the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship (which takes up surprisingly little of the novel), and makes it doomily but conventionally romantic/sexual (something that was essentially invented for Hollywood tastes by the 1939 Olivier/Merle Oberon adaptation).

In the novel teenage Cathy, after she’s got to know the Lintons, is frequently bored by Heathcliff’s company (she says sitting with him is like being with a baby or a dumb person), and to view him as a prospective husband, even in rejecting him, doesn’t seem to have occurred to her until Edgar proposes, when she doesn’t see her relationship with H as being at all changed by her prospective marriage, says that Edgar must learn to tolerate him, and doesn’t think H would understand what ‘being in love’ meant.

When Heathcliff returns after her marriage, she is delighted to see him, but there’s no evidence at all she regrets her choice of Edgar, or that she’s been in love with H all along — she just wants him to be able to visit her at Thrushcross Grange. She always voluntarily takes Isabella with her when they meet for a walk. There’s no undercurrent of sexual longing or possessiveness when Isabella’s attraction to H becomes evident. She’s primarily irritated by the Isabella situation because it infuriates Edgar and prevents her from ‘keeping Heathcliff as my friend’, which appears to be all she wants. H says he’s marrying Isabella in part to revenge himself on Cathy for her ill treatment of him. They kiss only on Cathy’s deathbed, when she’s heavily pregnant and will die later that night (when she also pulls out a handful of his hair), and it seems to be more about death separating them than sexual desire. There’s no evidence they ever have sex. And far from haunting him out of love, it’s Lockwood, a slightly dopey stranger, that ghost C appears to. She only haunts Heathcliff to stop him disinheriting her daughter by making him starve himself to death.

It’s a lot weirder than any ‘doomed romance’ adaptation has ever made it.

Yes, that’s pretty clear in the novel, that he beats and tortures her physically and psychologically, and as Isabella tells Ellen her heart had returned to Thrushcross Grange within 24 of her leaving it, we’d have to assume consent not really being a thing for Heathcliff.

Timothy Dalton bonked Cormoran Strike's mum.

There was ambiguity about baby Cathy and who her father was, and it was also implied Mr Earnshaw had cheated on his wife and Heathcliff was the result, which makes the rest of the 1970 adaptation in poor taste.

I haven't seen that one -- is it any good in general?

The one I vaguely remember being on TV when I was a child was the UK TV series from 1978, which I found repellent and frightening (but I was only about ten, and hadn't yet read WH).

Seeing a still from it recently in a round-up of adaptations of WH made me think about how an unthinking element of all contemporary-ish screen adaptations seems to be that Heathcliff needs to be played by a conventionally attractive actor (Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy, Jacob Elordi etc) and that he presents, at least in the after-the-missing-three-years part of the novel, as good-looking.

Whereas if you cast a conventionally unattractive actor, it's a lot less easy to pass off a character given to cruelty, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, possible murder, kidnapping and forced marriage, and exhuming his dead beloved as 'brooding and tempestuous'.

@MilanoCortina2026
Now you mention it, it IS odd that Mr Earnshsw brings back a child he’s simply found on the street. Surely there would have been so many such unfortunate children at the time. So why heathcliff in particular?
And why was he WALKING to Liverpool in the first place?
That would complicate the family tree though ( and just as well the love between H and C was unrequited!!

It would make sense if Heathcliffe was the illegitimate child of Mr Earnshaw but then any hint of a romantic relationship between Heathcliffe and Cathy would be grim.

Im watching the 1978 version now and it makes zero sense that anyone would like Heathcliffe, he is a complete monster and has no redeeming qualities that I can see.

Im not sure what the point of the story is, miserable people, lead miserable lives and then they die??

Yes, up to a point, but the next generation redeem and rectify it. We don't often get to see that as the majority of adaptations focus on the "love story".

@Couronne I enjoyed it even though it wasn't always faithful to the story.

I saw it in the cinema tonight. It's definitely worth seeing on a big screen, because the cinematography is amazing. The child actors are great and so is Martin Clunes. People laughed at the funny bits.
I found myself losing interest by the last half hour, though. Cathy constantly striding out in a silky cloak started to remind me of old Scottish Widows ads. Added to Heathcliff's blow-dry it just didn't work. The tone didn't match the first part of the film.
I also didn't like was how little the moors featured. It's a long time since I read the book, but I always imagined C and H as being together on the moors. The Linton house was stunning in this adaptation. It almost took from the story.

Ah, yes, the Linton house.

Two weeks from having seen the film I’m beginning to appreciate that EF decided to show us how the Linton house must have seemed to Cathy. Which is a neat trick. Annoyingly though, I can’t remember from the novel how we were supposed to understand the state of her own home. (Must be forty years since I read it.) So I don’t know if that too was ‘through Cathy’s eyes’ on screen.

I thought the whole film was a neat trick combining the traditional “popular version” of WH (Cathy and Heathcliff, passionate love story, the moors, etc), with plenty of nods to WH literary criticism, plus references to other thematically relevant films and art. It surprised me, because all the advance word had me expecting sub-Bridgeton fluff.

The difference in reaction to Fennell’s WH, del Toro’s recent Frankenstein (with its Marvel superhero-style Creature), and Gatiss’ very flawed take on Dracula a few years ago is interesting. They’re all jazzed-up takes on classic novels many people would have read at A-level and could feel possessively attached to. Why is Fennell’s attracting so much more disdain?

You’re right, it did look like those Scottish Widows ads!😀

Because of the overemphasis on sex I think.

I didn’t see the other films you mentioned so one of the reasons might be that the commentary is coming from different people!

Also, it’s all very well and good saying that there are nods to literary criticisms and other things but most people aren’t going to pick up on those and it still needs to stand alone as a good film to those who don’t. I don’t think it does - and I agree with others about the overemphasis on sex.

I thought Wuthering Heights itself looked very stage-set-ish, though I assume that was entirely intentional. The strange white bathroom tiles on the walls of the entranceway seemed to have been chosen purely to provide a contrast to the pig’s blood. I mean, no substantial gentry farmhouse would have had servants slaughter a pig at the front entrance of the house so that the daughter of the house had to wade through blood to go out, but again, I’m assuming this was just done for effect — stripped-down, bloody, visceral WH versus ‘civilised’, frilly Thrushcross Grange.

We don’t get a description of WH through Cathy’s eyes in the novel. Lockwood, when he visits in 1801, describes it as remote, barricaded against the wind by small windows and projecting stones at the corners, and is mostly struck by the fact that there’s no hall, you walk straight into the ‘house’ (family sitting room/kitchen), which is large and cheerful, with a huge fireplace, ‘primitive’ wooden chairs, a stone-flagged floor. It’s clearly more of a substantial farmhouse than he would have expected a man of Heathcliff’s stature and wealth to live in, and he thinks it ‘much inferior’ to TC. Nelly describes it as the ‘next best house’ in the neighbourhood to Linton.

One of the odder things in the film for me is that EF made the Lintons ‘trade’ and new arrivals — they’ve made their money from velvet. In the novel, they’re landowners long settled in the area like the Earnshaws, and old Mr Linton is the local magistrate, as Edgar is.