Click here for the flashback interview with Emerald Fennell for SALTBURN.
When Emily Bronte published WUTHERING HEIGHTS in 1847, it was hailed for its strangeness, its intensity, and its disquieting disquisition on obsession. Emerald Fennell, she of A PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN, has taken Brontë’s novel and re-imagined it for modern audiences, recreating the visceral violence of the emotions involved while streamlining the narrative, bringing into sharper focus the depravity of thwarted desire and, finally, nailing once and for all Nelly as the true villain of the piece.
We begin with that violence as the suggestive breathing we hear under the credits is revealed to be a man being hanged. The camera is unflinching as it catalogues his demise while children jeer and a nun reproves them. Also, there is young Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), wide-eyed at the spectacle and wild in appearance as she walks home dangling her souvenir of the spectacle, a doll with a noose around its neck. Her home, the eponymous Wuthering Heights, is a looming testament to an old family’s descent into poverty, helped along by the current scion, Cathy’s father (Martin Clunes), drinking and gambling away what little the family has left. In a fit of charity, however, he brings home a half-starved boy (Owen Cooper) off the streets of Liverpool, who is promptly named Heathcliff by Cathy, in honor of her dead brother once she recovers from the shock of finding she former street urchin under her bed.
From there the classic tale follows its prescribed course, as the children bond and grow into adults played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Theirs is a passionate attachment nurtured on and by the otherworldly moors around the family estate, yet it is also one of innocence, even when Cathy accidentally spies two servants engaging in fetishy coitus and Heathcliff attempts to preserve her innocence why covering her eyes. The genie, however, is out of the bottle, and childhood friendship runs headlong into adolescent hormones as Cathy discovers the pleasures of the flesh (albeit solo) and Heathcliff continues to respect her technical chastity.
Things change when the money finally runs out, and the nouveau riche Lintons move into Thrushcross Grange next door. Or, at least what passes for next door in the desolate landscape of the moors. Cathy, a wild thing but one that is beautiful, captures Edgar Linton’s heart despite her first appearance peering over a garden wall and evoking a shriek of terror from his ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver).
Fennell is ruthless in rewriting the story, and all for the betterment of turning into a visual feast for the eyes. A feast that is fraught with symbolism and commentary as it annotates the action. Wuthering Heights is neatly contrasted with the heaven-on-earth that is the Grange, the latter gloomy even in sunlight with low coffered ceilings and awkward exterior angles rendered in a black that echoes the rocky formations on the moors. The Grange is all sparkle and light, blue and white exteriors, huge windows, and the comfort of careless luxury. The characters are subtly changed, though Cathy and Heathcliff’s palpable passion is as potent as ever. In Fenell’s hands, it remains self-destructive in its bottomless desire. That desire is echoed in one of Fennell’s most daring changes, that of Isabella. Here she is Edgar’s ward instead of his sister, a strange creature of inchoate longings swooning over the fates of Romeo and Juliet before suffering her first pangs of lust for Heathcliffe. She is a repressed young woman given to suggestive scrapbooking and slightly repulsive paeans to Cathy once she moves in as mistress of the Grange.
Fennell here is exploring more than just Cathy and Heathcliffe’s doomed love, she is examining many facets of sexuality as it plays across gender, race, and class. Casting Hong Chau as Nelly, the housekeeper who keeps the secrets, and here the cast-off bastard of an English lord, provides a motivation for the silence that sets the tragedy in motion. The novel never says what motivation might have been as Nelly narrates the story to a third party many years later. It takes stock, and takes the side, of the literary critics over the years who have pegged the housekeeper as an unreliable narrator with hidden motives and, perhaps, fueled by her own obsessions.
Further changes include ignoring the novel’s description of Heathcliffe as swarthy, as in not white, by casting Elordi as the cast-off child not welcome in high society. Instead, she as cast South Asian actor Shazad Latif as Edgar, Cathy’s devoted, if unexciting, husband. As with everything else on the screen, it is a detail meant to prick and to provoke. Fennell is a filmmaker who leaves nothing to chance, from the way red gradually seeps onto the screen, starting as a small patch on a wall in the Heights, to a polished floor at the Grange that threatens to swallow the inhabitants whole. Red pops and explodes as a ribbon keeping Cathy’s hair in place with criss-crossing to match the restrictive corsets she willingly adopts with her new life. It is the color of a sunset that is as feral as the characters, and the feral accent to the white, black, and gray color scheme dominates.
Red as passion, red as blood, red as danger, and red as sacrifice, Fennell creates an otherworldly universe where life and death are fugue states, and in which fashions borrow from early Victorian, Regency, Elizabethan and the retro-future. The effect is to make a timeless framework for a story that was ahead of its own time and maybe ours, as well. The artifice heightens the emotions and makes the tragedy transcendent. The actors from the leads to those at the end of the credits are as passionately committed as Cathy and Heathcliffe themselves, endlessly complex and surprising in choices that propel these well-known icons into new territory. All are excellent, but Oliver as the giddy accomplice to her own degradation is a career defining moment for her.
Fennell’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS is an experience that is completely true in spirit to Brontë’s novel. Overpowering in its impact, impudent in its insistence on mordant humor, and completely enthralling in re-telling this strange, intense, and disquieting story.
Your Thoughts?