Wuthering Heights

Saw this at the Venice film festival last week. It had quite a few walk outs near the beginning (probably the strong Yorkshire accents with lots of background noise made it unintelligible for non native English speakers) and they were the lucky ones as it certainly did not improve over the following 2 hours.

The director's main aim seemed to be to try and shock audiences who thought they were coming to an Emma Thompson type costume drama by making the film as morose as possible and throwing in lots of swearing, violence and a bit of necrophilia. Unfortunately the only shocking thing was that they had managed to make such a bad film out of a classic novel.

There were numerous petty things which annoyed me about this film, e.g. the use of pathetic fallacy with the weather is way over the top (the Earnshaws live under a constant biblical downpour whereas there rich neighbours in the next door valley have a climate from a fruit juice advert); the cameraman either had Parkinson's or had been previously employed in one of those American police series where reality is represented by a constantly jerky camera; the actors playing the adult Cathy and Heathcliff look nothing like their younger selves - Heathcliff even appears to have changed race!; would a 19th century strict Christian father be happy with someone sleeping with his teenage daughter in the house?; would a 19th century Heathcliff be able to swan around Edgar house willy nilly? I could go on.

Most importantly I think the director fails completely in making us feel any sympathy for her characters. Heathcliff has a hard time of it in his youth but has no redeeming features. It's not helped by the fact that the actor playing the adult Heathcliff is atrociously bad at his job.

I have no problem with making Wuthering Heights dark and brooding but make it a bit less daft.

Like other reviewers I have read Emily Bronte's novel, but I am not sure we were reading the same book. My strongest impression from first reading was wonder that the book could be so engaging without a single character with whom to identify.

The characters in Wuthering Heights are unlikeable; Heathcliff and Hindley are downright nasty. Hatred, contempt and jealousy are the overriding emotions of the story. Certainly there is love – strong passionate love too – but it lives in dark corners and is ultimately destructive.

This film captures much of the emotion of the book. The first half, with Heathcliff, Catherine and Hindley as children is played very well indeed.

Heathcliff's character is determined in these early years at Wuthering Heights, and so it is in the film. When Heathcliff returns as an adult, inexplicably played by another actor, his heart has hardened and revenge, hatred and violence dominate his character. But James Howson who plays the adult Heathcliff is not up to the task, and nor it appears is the direction. Heathcliff is certainly violent, but this is mostly directed against animals seemingly as means of relieving his frustrations, rather than the depiction of a genuinely violent man. His appalling treatment of Isabelle is largely glossed over and the film ends before he starts abusing Hareton. Hatred, contempt and jealousy are expressed mainly by close-ups of facial expressions, and here Howson in the finery of his wealth only seems able to portray smugness.

The film lacks a point of view. The camera-work suggests the film is intended to show things from Heathcliff's perspective, but much seems to be deliberately obfuscated where Heathcliff would have known exactly what was going on. The audience is continually kept in the dark, emphasised by the rain, mist and long nights on the moors and, just in case we haven't got the idea, by repeated scenes shot out of focus. This is all very well, adding to atmosphere, but the book manages to bring the reader into the story; this film seeks to distance the audience, as voyeurs only. The people we see are the same people we read about and with much the same character. The children, it is true, were interesting to watch; but when Heathcliff went away, returning without comment played by a different actor (and Catherine too for that matter, but Kaya Scodelario played her role better; she had less to do), I found I no longer cared about any of them.

Heathcliff played as a black man works well. He is clearly of foreign extraction in the book – Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen – although equally clearly not 'a regular black' (also a quote). A black Heathcliff is far more convincing than an obviously white English one.

The language is also rather more 'colourful' than in the book. But this too seems to be justified. It sounds true enough to me and I did not detect any neologisms. It must be pretty impenetrable to non-native English speakers, but there is precious little of it. I know Heathcliff is taciturn, but the silences are unbearable. Even the book has Nelly Dean to carry the dialogue.

Finally there is the ending. The book more or less describes the story backwards, starting long after the film has ended and showing Heathcliff in his ultimate form. The film, quite rightly in my opinion, is in chronological order (barring some unnecessary and distracting flashbacks) and covers only Heathcliff's relationships with Catherine and Hindley. The ending is well chosen in terms of plot, but totally undermines whatever integrity the film had, for the entire film is shot without a background soundtrack. What we hear are the sounds of nature, songs being sung, out of tune and out of time but utterly in character. A poor band playing a mournful Christmas hymn (the Coventry Carol, is it?), branches tapping on a window, even though this last does not sound quite right, all add to the film's bleakness. But then, with only about a minute to go till the end, there intrudes a modern song played on modern instruments in a studio. I quite like Mumford and Sons, but what on earth is that song doing there? At least it could have started after the credits began to roll; the mood destroyed, this is one film I did not stay to read them.

Hareton disturbed me the most in this film based on Wuthering Heights. Dour before his time, he appears now and then in the early scenes, a dirty blonde-haired urchin, to gawp at visitors, or to witness violent abuse from the sidelines. In the final scene, he is seen hanging up dogs by their collars. The depiction of Hareton is related to the 'cruelty breeds cruelty' message in Andrea Arnold's film – and in Emily Brontë's novel, if that can be seen, glibly, as a straight deliverer of messages. Considerable respect has been shown to the original: a fair amount of thought and research seems to have gone into finding out what was in Emily Brontë's mind and how she saw her characters, and into the late eighteenth century in Yorkshire. All the artefacts – stoneware jars, spades for digging out peat and so on – look as if they have been borrowed from a folk museum, the costumes appear to be authentic, and Heathcliff is black. All perfectly credible.

The unknown James Howson from Leeds was cast as the adult Heathcliff, with the equally unknown Solomon Glave as his young version. We do not find out which language he speaks when he first arrives, because there is very little speaking in the whole film. It is not dialogue- free, employing a few sentences and phrases from the novel, rather like the quotes a candidate might fish out for an A-level essay, with more of them in the film's second half, after Heathcliff's return, than in the first. At other times, the words which the characters use seem to have grown from improvisation sessions, giving the action a kind of Ken Loach feel at times. To leave out most of Emily Brontë's beautiful prose – and the second half of her story, as usual – are bold moves which a few literary folk might find outrageous. I can fully understand the opinions of those who might describe the film as 'coarse and disagreeable', but then the structure of the novel does not match the needs of the cinema. Unlike Cary Fukunaga, who retained as many of Charlotte's words as possible in his Jane Eyre, Andrea Arnold has gone in an opposite direction, because she has decided not to bother with conventional costume dramas.

This Wuthering Heights relies on cinematography, the impact of fresh and young actors (eat your heart out, Stanislavski), an authentic period feel and a powerful, often startling harshness. Arnold has said that she "had to pick out the things that had resonance to me" and that she wanted to give the children plenty of time at the beginning.

This was a good move, because the children are by far the most interesting. Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer have "not acted before", but manage to be fascinating, holding everything together for an hour. Full marks to Arnold there. The story is told through sounds and sights: we see the boy's amazement and disorientation when he arrives, Cathy's warm smile – the only warmth – a feather brushing a cheek, his hand on the horse's rump when he rides behind her, his smelling of her hair, the weals on his back after a beating by Joseph, her mouth as she licks the blood from them, their crude and muddy sexual fumbling out on the moors. Sensual imagery with a vengeance! Raw teenage emotion in our faces! And I loved Shannon Beer's charming rendition of Barbara Allen. She's a proper wild, wicked slip of a girl.

Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan won the Golden Osella Award at the last Venice Film Festival for Best Cinematography, deservedly. His low shots through clumps of sedge and his panoramas of the moors (filming took place on the bleaker areas around Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales) are stunning, but what is especially memorable is his selection of close-ups of the insects, flowers and small creatures to be found in the heather and under the bilberries. I was looking out for harebells, but did not notice any. Perhaps they were the wrong kind of flower here. The wind sounded right – I recognise that wind – as it battered the microphone relentlessly.

The creatures of the wild moors a couple of centuries ago have a strong present-times feel, because casting in this way has put racial prejudice in the forefront. Heathcliff is full of revengeful passions because he has been racially abused. The violent skinhead Hindley (Lee Shaw) is notably foul-mouthed when he does speak, like an adherent of some far-right organisation, and the enforced baptism scene shows that the church was pretty short on tender loving care when it came to new dark-skinned members of the congregation. The West Yorkshire accents are just right.

In the second half, the adult Heathcliff (James Howson) does not spend long on relishing his revenge on Hindley, but that is not the only disappointment. Both James Howson and Kaya Scodelario, who plays the adult Cathy, bear only token resemblances to their child counterparts, and have less presence. Cathy is not differentiated from Isabella enough, and seems to be unrelated to her younger self, which can not be explained away by her presence in the sophistication of Thrushcross Grange, where manners (and the mild weather) are always better. Heathcliff seems somehow clumsier and less sympathetic, a fact which is not helped by James Howson's lack of acting experience (more forgivable in Solomon Glave), and the shots of flowers and insects which sustained the first half become less effective because they are repeated too much. James Northcote's acting as Edgar is faultless, but seems out of place here, as if he has stepped out of another film.

And that other film could be the 1939 version, which is at the other end of the spectrum.

This is a film about domestic violence, racism, cycles of abuse. It contains many scenes involving the infliction of pain. This is quite apart from the love story. So why did it leave my partner and I so unemotionally affected, apart from the rush of relief at leaving the cinema?

Wuthering Heights started well for me; I thought I was going to enjoy the experience of wild moorland, naturalism, authentic dirt, etc. Unfortunately, too little attention seemed to be paid to the quality of some of the cast's acting (some of which was, frankly, embarrassing) and after the nth roll on the wet moorland grass I began to lose patience with the lack of attention to the narrative detail.

Yes, the moors looked fantastic. Yes, we got that life was grim.

But the affectation of the hand-held camera is a metaphor for the film as a whole. It wobbles about and makes you feel a bit nauseous. And then it does it over and over again and again until you want to beg for mercy.

Although I will be aiming to judge Wuthering Heights on its own terms, I can't help sharing other reviewers' disappointment of this film. The book is bleak but wonderful, and I honestly find the characters and story much more compelling there than there.

Wuthering Heights(2011) isn't terrible as such. The scenery is stunning, likewise the costumes are quite good, the sound is very authentic and I liked the fact that the soundtrack is kept at minimal apart from at the end. The child counterparts of Cathy and Heathcliff are also truly excellent, especially Solomon Glave as a subdued and ferocious Heathcliff. Shannon Beer as young Cathy is just as striking. James Northcote is pretty effective as well, and Wuthering Heights does deserve credit for conveying a believable enough atmosphere especially at the start.

However, I didn't like the photography mostly. There are some nice shots here and there, but the hand-held camera work distracts from the bleakness of the story and seems too avant garde for a period piece for me. It may have worked in Red Road and Fish Tank, but it didn't here. The adult leads are not as good as the children, James Howson doesn't have enough of the characteristics that Glave brought and consequently he's bland. The fact that Glave and Howson don't look much alike takes away from the authenticity, and to me there is a lack of chemistry between Howson and Kaya Scodelario(who fares better, but Beer interested me more).

The script is very stilted. Just for the record, I wasn't expecting a letter-for-letter adaptation, and in all honesty there are not very many of those out there, but I don't think I was expecting dialogue that didn't flow very well from one line to the next or lines that came across as anachronistic. The story also disappoints. Granted the story of Wuthering Heights is a bleak and very difficult one to translate to screen, but in the translation here there is no passion, a lack of integrity in the ending, the way the story is told is too fractured in that the first half is better than the second by some considerable distance and the animal cruelty scenes were unnecessary and hard to watch.

Pacing is also an issue, the second half feels sluggish and I don't think the lack of chemistry helped nor with the lack of any likable or interesting characters, the support cast are much like caricatures as the film strips them of being any more memorable to make an effort to focus on the leads while ignoring the statuses and attitudes of the time, or ones to genuinely empathise with, they are too dull and underdeveloped to make me do that. Lastly, Mumford and Sons is a great song, but out of place here.

Overall, not a terrible film but a disappointing one. 5/10 Bethany Cox