WUTHERING HEIGHTS

There are two ways to look at Emerald Fennell's so-called adaptation of 'Wuthering Heights' - that is, as a film on its own, or as a version of Emily Brontë's novel, so let's do just that. As an adaptation, it's a trainwreck; it's so disinterested in telling Brontë's version of the story. While I can't say I'm the most familiar with the source material, you can tell from the jump that this film is associated with the novel in name only. Opening with a scene of a man hanging with an erection as onlookers appear to be turned on, it's clear she was going for shock value, not accuracy. If you want to make a smutty (we will get to the bland smut) period piece, do just that; that is not what the novel is. Putting quotation marks around the title doesn't give you permission to do whatever you want, nor does it give you forgiveness for the changes you made.

No film adaptation is ever going to be an entirely faithful adaptation - that's just impossible - but if you are attempting to adapt any piece of work, there has to be authenticity and respect for the thing you are adapting. There are ways to take beloved pieces of fiction and modernise them. Look at Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet' or Greta Gerwig's 'Little Women'; they modernise their source materials while still honouring the original works. You then also have films like '10 Things I Hate About You', 'She's the Man' and 'Clueless' that also modernise classic texts by making these stories inspired by classic works while placing them in a modern time period, but they also had the common sense not to call their films 'The Taming of Shrew', 'Twelfth Night' or 'Emma' because they are not trying to be faithful adaptions but instead inspired by them. Being inspired by something and wanting to adapt it are two very different things, and it's so clear Fennell had almost no intention to do either.

"There's a version that I remembered reading that isn't quite real. Then there's a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so, it is 'Wuthering Heights' and it isn't." Emerald, this isn't a variant of Chali XCX's album 'Brat'. If you want to make a movie based on what should have happened or your childhood memory, cool, do that, but you can't then also call your film the same name as the book, because it just isn't the same thing. It's also another layer to say these things on a press run, but that does not have that in the text. If you walk into this film without that preamble, you get a bland, lifeless romance that will make you question why this is such a beloved text. Fennell has taken a novel about race, classism and abuse and turned it into doomed lovers whom society is trying to keep apart.

The casting is the next problem. Catherine is meant to be this young, child-like, compulsive, unhinged brat, and Margot Robbie just isn't that. Robbie is young, yes, but not in the way this role requires. But the miscasting doesn't stop there. Jacob Elordi, a white boy from Queensland, is playing Heathcliff, described as a "dark-skinned gipsy" and "Lascar" in the book. That description is thrown out the window as Fennell felt Elordi "looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read", which is great for her, but maybe she needed to reexamine the text she was adapting; a book that has race tied to its themes. Changing the race of Heathcliff is just another illustration of how much they don't care to adapt Brontë's work with any respect and no desire to understand her text. For all the "sex" appeal that Elordi and Robbie have, it somehow translates to a lack of sexual chemistry. Two beautiful people, on beautiful sets, looking like they just met at lunch. It wants to be this grand, sexy epic, but lacks real sex appeal outside of your own feelings on whether you find the two leads attractive. Fennell proved with 'Saltburn' that she can do smutty, weird, sexy intimate scenes - but here, no matter how much the marketing wants you to believe that this is a smut film, the smut is turned down to a 1 with lots of bland kissing montages, eggs and fingers. If this is the first time you've seen people kiss you might have a heart attack, but for others its sexiness is a snooze-fest.

If you remove the adaptation, what you're left with is a bland, thin romance. The film wants us to believe this couple has so much chemistry they have to be together, but the world they live in doesn't allow it. Expect we never see that; much of the preamble to their relationship when they were children is condensed into a montage, so we don't get to see this connection form. Then, when they are adults, they are apart for so much of the runtime that when they finally reunite, there is no chemistry, no matter how many times we see them kiss.

'Wuthering Heights' is a failure as an adaptation; it wants to be a smuttier 'Bridgerton' by way of BookTok, but it struggles to capture any of those audiences. From miscast leads lacking chemistry to a bland romance and a misguided focus on its themes - both Fennell's own and that of the novel - 'Wuthering Heights' is an uninspired misfire that will alienate fans of the source material and newcomers alike. Adaptation is and will always be tricky, but here they just aren't interested in adapting any aspect of that story, turning this into fanfiction - again, something that can be interesting, but you can't have your version of events and have it be an adaptation. But hey, we got new Charli XCX music, so it's not all bad.