I think anyone who has read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights can agree that it’s a challenging read. Perspectives change chapter to chapter, Joseph the servant’s dialogue is basically unreadable, and most of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love story is played out through the next generation after—spoiler alert—Cathy dies during childbirth. In Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, she focuses on the most engaging elements of the book: Heathcliff and Cathy’s love, passion, and mutual destruction.Â
The film never claimed to be a perfect mirror of the book. Fennell herself said, when explaining the quotes around the title of her adaption: “What I can say is I'm making a version of [the book]. There's a version that I remembered reading that isn't quite real. And there's a version [where] I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn't.”Â
With this in mind, she was successful. Each character felt like a doll Fennell uses to play out her version of the story—the obsessive childhood bond between Heathcliff and Cathy at Wuthering Heights (Cathy’s family home), Cathy’s eventual choice of social status over love, her early death, and Heathcliff’s lifelong spiral into revenge. A literal doll motif continuously shows up in the film, too, beginning with a young Cathy, who watches a man being hanged while tightly clutching her doll. Again, when Cathy marries the wealthy suitor Linton (Shazad Latif), and her new sister-in-law, Isabella (Alison Oliver), gifts her a handmade doll made using Cathy’s own collected hair. And, most notably, in the large dollhouse replica of Thrushcross Grange, the Linton estate, that stands looming behind the dining-room table. So, who better to play the starring role than Barbie herself, Margot Robbie?Â
At first, I was highly skeptical of the casting choices. Jacob Elordi was not at all how I imagined the scrappy, tortured, and probably-not-white orphan boy Heathcliff. But the longer I sit with the film, the more I can accept that he’s one of the only actors who could make this complex character work on screen. Brontë’s Heathcliff is cruel, insensitive, and brooding, and throughout the novel, I thought, why in the world are these women lusting after such an unlikable brute? But Elordi as Heathcliff—sweaty, grinning, and aroused—makes it make sense. You, too, would fold under the spell of his dark eyes with his fingers in your mouth. And, although Fennell’s interpretation of Linton is far more likable than Brontë’s, the choice is clear: Heathcliff eats Cathy out and licks the tears from her cheeks. Linton rails her in missionary while she dissociates.
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