With innovative casting and stark storytelling, Andrea Arnold's film is a breathtakingly fresh interpretation of the Emily Brontë novel.
It's an ancient story. Girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, but girl cannot date boy because of an unbreachable social chasm. Warring tribal politics prevent Romeo and Juliet from their happily ever after. In Twilight, it's because of intra-species constraints. Hubbell and Katie prove that lock-jawed WASPs and Jewish Marxists in the McCarthy era do not a marriage make.
So it is in Emily Brontë's 1847 dark classic Wuthering Heights, where higher-class Cathy Earnshaw and Healthcliff, a foundling from Liverpool who Mr. Earnshaw adopts, pine for one another over the course of a lifetime. Not only is the trope of impossible love a worn-in thread in the fabric of storytelling, but Brontë's novel has been adapted to film no fewer than 17 times, from the iconic 1939 gothic version starring Laurence Olivier, to Luis Buñuel's surrealist 1954 interpretation set in Mexico, to MTV's 2003 retelling at a California high school. So how to put a fresh spin on an eternal story? How does a filmmaker re-invent such a canonical text?
"It's kind of a stupid thing to do, isn't it?" asked Andrea Arnold, the director of the latest iteration of Wuthering Heights, which opens in theaters this Friday. "I said I'd never do an adaptation or a period piece, and here I am doing the most famous book of all time." Despite Arnold's initial misgivings, she has crafted a singular, subtle film that stands on its own. Stripped of costume-y froth or a swelling score, the film is as airy as the windswept moors and just as harsh. Arnold communicates the first throbs of desire between the young couple with very little dialogue, and uses the tawny hills, the crest of their horses' backs, and the slapping rain to represent their visceral connection and the sadomasochistic impossibility of their courtship. Unlike Twilight and similarly romantic tales, Arnold's film shows forbidden love not as sweet sorrow, but rather as bone-grinding misery punctuated with moments of transcendent rapture.