Wuthering Heights

Saw this at the Venice film festival last week. It had quite a few walk outs near the beginning (probably the strong Yorkshire accents with lots of background noise made it unintelligible for non native English speakers) and they were the lucky ones as it certainly did not improve over the following 2 hours.

The director's main aim seemed to be to try and shock audiences who thought they were coming to an Emma Thompson type costume drama by making the film as morose as possible and throwing in lots of swearing, violence and a bit of necrophilia. Unfortunately the only shocking thing was that they had managed to make such a bad film out of a classic novel.

There were numerous petty things which annoyed me about this film, e.g. the use of pathetic fallacy with the weather is way over the top (the Earnshaws live under a constant biblical downpour whereas there rich neighbours in the next door valley have a climate from a fruit juice advert); the cameraman either had Parkinson's or had been previously employed in one of those American police series where reality is represented by a constantly jerky camera; the actors playing the adult Cathy and Heathcliff look nothing like their younger selves - Heathcliff even appears to have changed race!; would a 19th century strict Christian father be happy with someone sleeping with his teenage daughter in the house?; would a 19th century Heathcliff be able to swan around Edgar house willy nilly? I could go on.

Most importantly I think the director fails completely in making us feel any sympathy for her characters. Heathcliff has a hard time of it in his youth but has no redeeming features. It's not helped by the fact that the actor playing the adult Heathcliff is atrociously bad at his job.

I have no problem with making Wuthering Heights dark and brooding but make it a bit less daft.

I wouldn't recommend this film unless you like endless shots of bleak moorland, mud, circling lapwings and the backs of peoples'heads. Funny how the poster show the back of young Heathcliffe's head. I don't mind slow moving films where not much happens, but I didn't feel this particular film had the artistic merit to carry it off. It could have done with much more rigorous editing to bring the running time down to about 90 minutes.

Having Heathcliffe played by black actors was an interesting idea and worked well. I also liked it that a large part of the film concentrated on the early parts of the book -apparently in contrast to other film versions -especially as the younger actors performed quite well. It was as a shame that the acting deteriorated so much with the adult cast to the extent that I could detect no passion or chemistry between Heathcliffe and Cathy.

I thought the film was overall a dreary waste of time. It seems to have been liked more by the professional critics than by the real audience - show people grim raw reality far removed from their comfortable lives (I am referring to London based critics who only spend weekends in the country) and they are easily impressed. I got the same impression with reviews of Winter's Bone -a film I thought equally bad.

Like other reviewers I have read Emily Bronte's novel, but I am not sure we were reading the same book. My strongest impression from first reading was wonder that the book could be so engaging without a single character with whom to identify.

The characters in Wuthering Heights are unlikeable; Heathcliff and Hindley are downright nasty. Hatred, contempt and jealousy are the overriding emotions of the story. Certainly there is love – strong passionate love too – but it lives in dark corners and is ultimately destructive.

This film captures much of the emotion of the book. The first half, with Heathcliff, Catherine and Hindley as children is played very well indeed.

Heathcliff's character is determined in these early years at Wuthering Heights, and so it is in the film. When Heathcliff returns as an adult, inexplicably played by another actor, his heart has hardened and revenge, hatred and violence dominate his character. But James Howson who plays the adult Heathcliff is not up to the task, and nor it appears is the direction. Heathcliff is certainly violent, but this is mostly directed against animals seemingly as means of relieving his frustrations, rather than the depiction of a genuinely violent man. His appalling treatment of Isabelle is largely glossed over and the film ends before he starts abusing Hareton. Hatred, contempt and jealousy are expressed mainly by close-ups of facial expressions, and here Howson in the finery of his wealth only seems able to portray smugness.

The film lacks a point of view. The camera-work suggests the film is intended to show things from Heathcliff's perspective, but much seems to be deliberately obfuscated where Heathcliff would have known exactly what was going on. The audience is continually kept in the dark, emphasised by the rain, mist and long nights on the moors and, just in case we haven't got the idea, by repeated scenes shot out of focus. This is all very well, adding to atmosphere, but the book manages to bring the reader into the story; this film seeks to distance the audience, as voyeurs only. The people we see are the same people we read about and with much the same character. The children, it is true, were interesting to watch; but when Heathcliff went away, returning without comment played by a different actor (and Catherine too for that matter, but Kaya Scodelario played her role better; she had less to do), I found I no longer cared about any of them.

Heathcliff played as a black man works well. He is clearly of foreign extraction in the book – Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen – although equally clearly not 'a regular black' (also a quote). A black Heathcliff is far more convincing than an obviously white English one.

The language is also rather more 'colourful' than in the book. But this too seems to be justified. It sounds true enough to me and I did not detect any neologisms. It must be pretty impenetrable to non-native English speakers, but there is precious little of it. I know Heathcliff is taciturn, but the silences are unbearable. Even the book has Nelly Dean to carry the dialogue.

Finally there is the ending. The book more or less describes the story backwards, starting long after the film has ended and showing Heathcliff in his ultimate form. The film, quite rightly in my opinion, is in chronological order (barring some unnecessary and distracting flashbacks) and covers only Heathcliff's relationships with Catherine and Hindley. The ending is well chosen in terms of plot, but totally undermines whatever integrity the film had, for the entire film is shot without a background soundtrack. What we hear are the sounds of nature, songs being sung, out of tune and out of time but utterly in character. A poor band playing a mournful Christmas hymn (the Coventry Carol, is it?), branches tapping on a window, even though this last does not sound quite right, all add to the film's bleakness. But then, with only about a minute to go till the end, there intrudes a modern song played on modern instruments in a studio. I quite like Mumford and Sons, but what on earth is that song doing there? At least it could have started after the credits began to roll; the mood destroyed, this is one film I did not stay to read them.

Yes, it's very slow, but that's not the core of the problem: the heart of the problem is that there is no heart. I cannot relate to anyone in the film. I wanted to cheer on Heathcliff, but it soon becomes apparent why that's incredibly difficult to do. The characters are mostly just boorish and disgusting.

Although I will be aiming to judge Wuthering Heights on its own terms, I can't help sharing other reviewers' disappointment of this film. The book is bleak but wonderful, and I honestly find the characters and story much more compelling there than there.

Wuthering Heights(2011) isn't terrible as such. The scenery is stunning, likewise the costumes are quite good, the sound is very authentic and I liked the fact that the soundtrack is kept at minimal apart from at the end. The child counterparts of Cathy and Heathcliff are also truly excellent, especially Solomon Glave as a subdued and ferocious Heathcliff. Shannon Beer as young Cathy is just as striking. James Northcote is pretty effective as well, and Wuthering Heights does deserve credit for conveying a believable enough atmosphere especially at the start.

However, I didn't like the photography mostly. There are some nice shots here and there, but the hand-held camera work distracts from the bleakness of the story and seems too avant garde for a period piece for me. It may have worked in Red Road and Fish Tank, but it didn't here. The adult leads are not as good as the children, James Howson doesn't have enough of the characteristics that Glave brought and consequently he's bland. The fact that Glave and Howson don't look much alike takes away from the authenticity, and to me there is a lack of chemistry between Howson and Kaya Scodelario(who fares better, but Beer interested me more).

The script is very stilted. Just for the record, I wasn't expecting a letter-for-letter adaptation, and in all honesty there are not very many of those out there, but I don't think I was expecting dialogue that didn't flow very well from one line to the next or lines that came across as anachronistic. The story also disappoints. Granted the story of Wuthering Heights is a bleak and very difficult one to translate to screen, but in the translation here there is no passion, a lack of integrity in the ending, the way the story is told is too fractured in that the first half is better than the second by some considerable distance and the animal cruelty scenes were unnecessary and hard to watch.

Pacing is also an issue, the second half feels sluggish and I don't think the lack of chemistry helped nor with the lack of any likable or interesting characters, the support cast are much like caricatures as the film strips them of being any more memorable to make an effort to focus on the leads while ignoring the statuses and attitudes of the time, or ones to genuinely empathise with, they are too dull and underdeveloped to make me do that. Lastly, Mumford and Sons is a great song, but out of place here.

Overall, not a terrible film but a disappointing one. 5/10 Bethany Cox