MARGOT ROBBIE AND JACOB ELORDI IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"

Bodice ripper

So Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) has taken on Wuthering Heights . In case Eng.Lit. was not your subject, this is the famous single romance novel penned by Emily Brontë, one of three Brontë sisters who all wrote, the other sisters being Anne and Charlotte, and Charlotte's Jane Eyre initially being preferred. In one way Fennell's movie is a great success: box office. It's going to make its $80 million back and then some. Coming just before Valentine's Day wasn't a bad idea. This is a brooding, tormented nineteenth-century romance to which Ms. Fennell has added lots of fairly explicit sex. In another era nobody would want their teenage daughters to see it, which probably is why teenage girls will want to. On the other hand, deep down, this isn't as disturbing as the original novel. And maybe that's because it doesn't have a deep-down.

The new Wuthering Heights (or rather "Wuthering Heights," as it is designated) is a gorgeous thing to look at. Though the clothes, jewelry, and interiors are more important than the people, Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine are pretty. Elordi just isn't brooding enough for my taste, though this is Fennell's own simplified version of the story which doesn't delve very far into the minds and sensibilities of its characters - despite the huge changes the story specifries for them that are carried over here.

In any version of the story Heathcliff is a wild boy adopted, or saved from abuse, by Mr. Earnshaw, Catherine's father. Dad dies off early in the book, but, played by Martin Clunes in a role awfully different from the adorably cranky Doc Martin of British TV he's famous for, he lives on and on, way past his shelf life as a "complex" but inexplicable character. In fact Fennell doesn't think in terms of character but of action - and visuals. Mr. Earnshaw wants to make Heathcliff into a gentleman or at least teach him gentlemen's ways. But when he grows up he makes him a servant, or more like a handyman. As a boy Heathcliff is improbably played by Owen Cooper. Cooper is already famous as the young teenager who has committed murder in Netflix's celebrated "Adolescence." Photographed with the closeups this film favors he is interesting looking. He has great presence. He doesn't have the wildness required for young Heathcliff - or the non-white "gipsy" look (a word in the novel omitted here). Heathcliff and Catherine play and are best of friends, sowing the seeds for a lifelong frustrated romance.

Soon the Heathcliff role is taken over by Elordi, who acquires ridiculously long hair and beard, to make up for the fact that, like Cooper, Elordi just isn't wild enough or dark enough either. It will look good on Elordi's CV to have played two such famous weirdos of literature in one year, but the Creature in Del Toro's Frankenstein is the more important and better role. His Heathcliff isn't scary or dark, he's just hairy at first. Then he goes away for a few years and comes back mysteriously rich and neatly tonsured and buys the gloomy, crumbling Wuthering Heights. Certainly Elordi cleans up real good, but the movie doesn't provide him with much of the novel's essential lingering darkness behind the clean look.

Now, for the looks. The main focus is on the bright, rich household near Wuthering Heights that largely takes over the screen when Catherine marries Edgar Linton of the Linton family and goes to live at their posh domain, Thrushcross Grange. The memories of this film that will linger are of the grandiose but remarkably under-furnished interiors at Thrushcross Grange, the gowns and jewelry worn by Catherine, and, later on, while she is pregnant, the largely outdoor sex with the new cleaned-up and rich Heathcliff. That sex has been debunked by some viewers, but I found it a decided turn-on.

The one indelible visual memory this film will leave behind, however, is of Catherine's necklaces. In the part of the film immediately following Catherine's marriage there are seven scenes in a row and in each one she is wearing a different spectacular diamond necklace. Seven different necklaces. It is distracting. Fennell has said she had to "kill a lot of her darlings" to get this novel onto the screen but she made no move to control her jewelry fetish. Thrushcross Grange seems a visually flashy more than a habitable place. It has a large doll's house replica of itself inside itself with another doll's house replica inside that etc. etc., a feature of the film whose preciosity is numbing. Perhaps also to underline the artificiality of this brighter non-Wuthering world is the casting of the part-Pakistani actor Shazad Latif as Edgar, the rich neighbor Catherine marries. The longtime Wuthering Heights servant Nelly is cast too as an Asian, Vietnamese Vy Nguyen as a girl, then Thai Hong Chau as an aging adult. Hong Chau fits into her role snugly, Shazad Latif not so well. He never ceases to seem an alien.

There is a lot of focus in a way on Clunes as Earnshaw, a man with a crippling gambling addiction the enriched Heathcliff exploits to take over the estate. Clunes and Hong Chau are actors who get some dialogue. Nelly gets involved in the debate about the ethics of Catherine's marriage and why, oh why, she did not save herself for Heathcliff since they pledged and felt eternal love. Perhaps it is because she did not want to live any longer in a dark pigsty. In fact the slaughter of a very large pig is featured in the film. Catherine not being available, Heathcliff marries Isabella Linton, the sister of Edgar Linton. He marries her not for love, but as part of a revenge plot to torment her and gain control of the Linton family estate. The marriage is immediately abusive, and Isabella eventually flees to London, where she gives birth to their son, Linton Heathcliff.

With scenes to illustrate Heathcliff's revenge marriage, Fennell turns to a BDSM mode that is certainly ugly and unpleasant, a contrast to all the prettiness. But then, when Catherine is pregnant with Edgar's child - though Heathcliff asks if it's his - there is a series of quick scenes with Heathcliff towering over Catherine. Elordi is 6'5", but the camera angles enhance this. The effect is very much of the old fashioned bodice-ripper novel cover, and it begins to seem that Fennell is just as much aspiring to the easier goal of those as to a recreation of Brontë's much more complex novel.

Then people die, offspring marry, the action trails off; and this is, in part, because Emily Brontë's very complicated 400-page novel has a whole second half that, to make a movie, Fennell understandably dropped. Viewers will differ on whether the highlight of the movie is the finery or the sex. I would plump for the sex. This is perhaps not as "important" as Fennell's two previous features, but it seemed to me less infuriating and more fun. Perhaps she is going soft and falling for money, as one does.

The eroticism begins with the wholly interpolated opening sequence in the film of a public hanging attended by the children, Nelly, Catherine, and Heathcliff with the hanged man getting a visible erection, prompting general mockery and noted by the girls. The hanging quickly devolves into an all-out bacchanal, as onlookers drink, dance and kiss in the square surrounding the flailing corpse. This is where Fennell adds a wink-nudge, weird-funny note not in the novel. It comes maybe before you really know what's going on, more like a dash of hot sauce before you begin the meal. So I guess that is infuriating, after all.

"Wuthering Heights," 136 mins., premiered in Los Angeles Jan. 28, 2026 and in London Feb. 5. Metacritic rating: 55%.


JACOB ELORDI AND MARGOT ROBBIE IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.