Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights inadvertently explores what it would be like if no one ever matured passed high school and all of the drama and petty relationship conflicts of one’s developing years had lifelong, and sometimes dire, consequences. Amazingly, it does this without every coming across as silly, despite what that description might imply. In fact, quite the contrary. It tells its story with more realism and subtlety than a melodrama, high brow or otherwise, while also avoiding a sort of self aware tone or underhanded satire of its central characters and their struggles. It is as earnest as one can be in a movie with a haunted house. If this sounds like engrossing popcorn fodder, this film is for you. If this sounds like a bunch of ridiculous dreck, you will not enjoy yourself.

The story deals with a more British notion of static (or at least inflexible) definitions of class, and the complications that can create when feelings develop between one or more childhood friends who have similar standings in practice but different classes by birth. While the two are actually wildly different, something in the tone and emotional content reminded me of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. A man and woman who have known each other since they were very young begin to have feelings for each other as they enter early adulthood. Things never seem to work out for them, in large part because the girl is of a higher class. They also can’t communicate their feelings very well, which further complicates everything. They end up going their separate ways. When they find each other again the circumstances have changed, so they both go out of their way to make the other miserable as punishment for their past choices or out of jealousy. In turn, these actions make others miserable. You can see why I compared this to dysfunctional high school relationships.

As silly as this may all seem, with grown adults acting in such a childish manner, the movie really sells this story. Every member of the small cast does an excellent job of making you feel the raw emotional nerves being rubbed in every scene. You really believe that these people would act this way. Laurence Olivier radiates charisma as the handsome, dirt caked stable boy and Merle Oberon embodies the duality of her character, desiring both rebellious freedom represented by the moors and the safety and security of city-living and a wealthy husband. Even the completely out there moments, where heartbreak is presented as an even worse wasting disease than tuberculosis, the cast somehow makes you not really notice or care how the story puts romantic metaphor over reality in such an overt way.

This all star cast, and some fairly deft directing, carries the story. The novel of the same name, on which the film is based, is a classic of the Gothic romance genre, but its heavy tone, constantly miserable characters, and more fantastic elements would struggle on film without such an excellent production to bring them to life. The haunting of the titular estate alone would be a tough sell for modern audiences when the rest of the story is played completely straight. The audience expectation, based on years of precedent from other films, is for ghost stories to be contextualized as ghost stories, even in non-horror films like Over Her Dead Body or Ghost, rather than throwing spirits into a grounded character drama otherwise devoid of supernatural elements.

The ghostly elements also represent the one place I thought the film took a wrong step: in the return to the framing device for the film’s conclusion. I found Heathcliff’s character more compelling when, in the framing device scenes, he is driven somewhat mad by just the belief that Cathy’s spirit is still at the house causing havoc. This takes his obsession with her to the next level and shows how he allows the memory of her to continue to ruin his life, and the lives of those around him, even all these years later. However, if her spirit is real, and actually is causing havoc, this takes Heathcliff’s behavior from misery of his own making, a constant theme in the movie, and re-positions it as something external, which also somewhat forgives his madness and casual cruelty. This choice keeps the movie more in line with its source material, to be fair, but I think it isn’t necessarily to the film’s benefit. It is OK for the book to be the book and the movie to be the movie.

Ironically, even when the film’s ending deviates from the book rather dramatically, as it does in its final moments, it just stumbles in a different way, undercutting many of the ideas of the film that proceed it. Characters that perhaps rightly should be punished for how they have acted are strangely rewarded (in a way) while other characters whose lives were made worse in the process are left to pick up the pieces. This was not the intended ending of the film, according to the director, but one mandated by the studio, probably out of fear that audiences wouldn’t connect with the rather bleak ending that was originally imagined. Whatever the reason, the result is something that, to me at least, didn’t seem as strong as the rest of the movie.  Personally, I am rather slow to complain about overly saccharine “Hollywood” endings, but in this case I feel they might have missed the mark.  Not that the ending is bad, to be clear, just that it had the potential to be a lot better.

Wuthering Heights is not a film I expect to have an amazingly broad appeal, at least for modern viewers, but if it is in your wheelhouse it is very good. An openly melodramatic premise is elevated by superb acting and confident direction. Wuthering Heights understands that its core characters and conflicts have a universality to them that transcend the stranger aspects of its Gothic romance source material. All of that makes for something not just highly watchable but emotionally gripping as well… as long as that kind of drama is your cup of tea.

Would Recommend: If you love the works of the Bronte sisters.

Would Not Recommend: If you wouldn’t read a Bronte sisters book on a bet.