Fennell’s “This is my Wuthering Heights” defense proves the justification for the gleeful rewriting—some might say butchering—of the 1847 novel. The primary couple is the same: Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), the haughty daughter of a landowner, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the brooding orphan who is raised alongside her like a brother. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Cathy opines before marrying local aristocrat Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), dooming everyone and herself in the process. What this film proceeds to excise could fill a book—a book called Wuthering Heights.
Oddly enough, Emerald Fennell’s prior features—mean and stylish, equal parts revenge play and music video—seem more moved by the spirit of Emily Brontë than this one. In Promising Young Woman, a med school dropout (Carey Mulligan) feigns drunkenness to expose the predatory behavior of so-called “nice guys,” while conducting a campaign against the men who raped her childhood best friend. And in Saltburn, a middle-class striver (Barry Keoghan) insinuates himself into an uber-rich family through lies and sex acts, only to pick off these fatted sitting ducks one by one. Her films demand that viewers spend time with irredeemable individuals and endure, even laugh at or luxuriate in, their awful behavior. Meanwhile, this Wuthering Heights has not one but multiple redemption arcs. Characters offer and accept forgiveness. What, truly what, am I watching?
Turning Brontë’s tale into “this generation’s Titanic” requires more than the smoothing of Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s edges, though that is the film’s most startling intervention. Brontë’s Cathy is quick to cuff a servant or scream her face off at everyone around her; her Heathcliff is a literal dog murderer. None of this comes through in Robbie’s or Elordi’s renderings, who play like Buttercup and Westley in The Princess Bride. The sight of a miserable Catherine, weighed down by a diamond choker, set against a millennial pink backdrop, cries out for a Billie Eilish track. Indeed, what was Cathy made for, if not to love Heathcliff? (LuckyChap Entertainment, Robbie’s production company, is responsible for Barbie and all of Fennell’s directorial turns.)
Barbie is just one of many films that weigh heavily on Wuthering Heights, competing to overtake the actual source entirely.Is Fennell entitled to treat the Western canon as her own personal playground? Why not call the movie Windy Peaks and quit filching Brontë’s luster? Because this particular Wuthering Heights is foremost a work of fan fiction, and proudly so. Catherine’s feverish scribbling of alternate names on the window—“Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, Catherine Heathcliff”—is the act of a lovesick adolescent doodling in her Trapper Keeper; this film “will complete the Twilight-to-Fifty-Shades Smutty Fanfic Loop,” a critic from Thought Catalog vows.
All roads, in other words, lead back to Barbie.
When we first meet Isabella Linton, Cathy’s future sister-in-law, she is giving her brother a detailed play-by-play of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. A frizzy-haired brunette with wire-framed glasses and a whispery voice, Isabella is a bookish young woman, one of the most unforgivable archetypes in classic literature. This silly exchange, which immediately precedes the Lintons meeting Catherine, serves several purposes. Isabella’s mistrust of the Nurse figure in Shakespeare put us on guard with the film’s own nurse figure, Nelly (Hong Chau), and her passionate recounting of the play only underscores how much this Wuthering Heights is about bad timing, not bad people. (Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is, unsurprisingly, another one of Fennell’s self-proclaimed touchstones.)
When Edgar and Catherine wed, Isabella welcomes her new sister-in-law as a life-size doll, braiding her hair and taking locks of her hair to make a Cathy figure for her dollhouse (dreamhouse, even?). Isabella’s infatuation with Catherine ends when Heathcliff, who ran off in the wake of Cathy and Edgar’s wedding, returns looking, well, like Jacob Elordi. In the novel, Isabella surrenders to Heathcliff’s bored seduction, one designed entirely to drive Cathy mad, but lives to regret marrying this sadistic monster.
It is within Isabella’s mousy, lustful, literary gaze that this new Wuthering Heights finds a point of view, the unexpected romance trapped inside its bodice-ripper rebrand.It is within Isabella’s mousy, lustful, literary gaze that this new Wuthering Heights finds a point of view, the unexpected romance trapped inside its bodice-ripper rebrand. This is, perhaps, where Fennell falters most gravely—not by scrapping the old or instituting the new but, instead, by not recognizing what she has.
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