'Wuthering Heights' review: No passion
Updated 4:38 pm, Thursday, October 18, 2012
The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's "Wuthering Heights" is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless. The other, more positive aspects of the film are intellectual in nature, the sort of things you might notice and think, "Oh, that's good," or "That's interesting." Taken all together they can't compensate - they can't even begin to compensate - for what is essentially a misunderstanding of (or an inability to convey) the breathing soul of this material.
In Arnold's version, Heathcliff is African, probably an escaped slave, who is taken in as a stable boy by the Earnshaw family, where he develops a strange and tortured closeness with Cathy, the spirited young daughter. The changing of Heathcliff's race turns out to be an idea without much resonance that's given little follow-through, changing next to nothing besides the specific ethnic slurs thrown his way by the cruel overseers.
Half the film shows Heathcliff and Cathy as kids, walking around the windblown Heath. The desolated bleakness of the countryside, the silence save for the wind, the cold nights by the fire in a family in which no one speaks - these are the atmospherics of "Wuthering Heights" and the most memorable elements of it. Such a blank setting could have been put to good use. Indeed, it might have set off in sharp relief the intensity and force of Heathcliff and Cathy's strange connection. But no, they are as dull as their surroundings, both as children and adults.
That Arnold chose to cast inexperienced unknowns in the lead roles exacerbated the problem. When people can't act, they do one of two things: They either don't try, or they try and fail. In the case of the two Heathcliffs, young (Solomon Glave) and adult (James Howson), they didn't try. They just stay blank. In the case of the older Cathy (Kaya Scodelario), she did try, and what results are some of the biggest, falsest acting moments you'll see onscreen this year. To be fair, Shannon Beer as the young Cathy pretty much survives.
Arnold's previous film was "Fish Tank," a tale of modern English poverty, and in a movie like that you can cast unknowns, have them play close to their own personalities and get away with it - sometimes even benefit from it. But to employ that strategy in a period piece demanding epic emotion, that's just asking for trouble. And trouble is what this director got.