Andrea Arnold (2011)

‘Love is a force of nature’, announces the poster – hardly an original choice of tag line for the latest screen version of Emily Brontë, even if it were not identical to Brokeback Mountain’s only six years ago.  Yet Andrea Arnold’s approach to the material is ‘radical’.  The swarthy gipsyish Heathcliff of the novel is now a man of colour.  At one point, he rails at the Linton family as ‘fucking cunts’.  In the first scene, he’s banging his head against a wall and a floor. When the adolescent Catherine and Heathcliff are out on the moors together, she’s in trousers more than once. No doubt research-has-shown teenage girls really did sometimes wear trousers outdoors in the mid-nineteenth century.  Arnold evidently wants a non-verbal Wuthering Heights but she and her co-writer Olivia Hetreed can’t find a way of achieving that in the central part of the story, when Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights a rich man, and it’s here that the film’s inadequacies are fully exposed.  Arnold’s depiction of the adolescence of Cathy and Heathcliff does at least work on its own terms, even if those terms are uninteresting.  She makes things ‘real’ by stressing the relentless arduousness of lives in this time and place – the cold, inhospitable house, the mud, the lousy weather – as if a more nuanced treatment would amount to tame compromise.  (There’s no music except for the odd fragment of song.)  If Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is shot in mostly natural light, the interiors of this Wuthering Heights go one better – natural darkness.   A lot of the time I couldn’t see what was going on inside the eponymous house but I could soon guess it was something grim:   Arnold replaces the novel’s emotional violence with physical violence.  I lost count of the number of times Heathcliff was whipped or beaten by the malignant Hindley.

The director is back in her comfort zone once Catherine has died:  Heathcliff can climb onto her deathbed and just about have  sex with her and, in her grave, scrabble with his nails on the coffin lid, and try to beat his brains out (that opening sequence turns out to be a flash forward to this point in the story).  But the intervening section, although it contains more yelling and fisticuffs than you’re used to in Wuthering Heights, is mostly dramatised in a less unfamiliar way.  (When Catherine, now married to Edgar Linton and mistress of Thrushcross Grange, sits drinking tea with Heathcliff and her husband in the drawing room, there is even a caged bird in evidence …)  As a result, there are more words:  we see and even more hear the acting limitations of Kaya Scodelario and James Howson as the young adult Catherine and Heathcliff.   According to Wikipedia, Natalie Portman and Abbie Cornish were lined up for Cathy at different stages in the development of this production; Michael Fassbender was in the frame for Heathcliff.  It’s consistent with Arnold’s approach that she ended up with less familiar names:  someone we’ve never or hardly seen before can bring an intense reality to a character that it’s harder for a better-known actor to achieve, and this approach paid off for Arnold both in Red Road and Fish Tank (where she also had Fassbender).  But it’s a pointless exercise if the fresh faces are merely trying and failing to sound like proper actors, as Scodelario and, especially, Howson are doing.  I resent the film’s implication that its take on Emily Brontë is more challenging, does something more difficult than a traditional adaptation of Wuthering Heights could do.  It serves Arnold right that her two leads – and others in the cast – demonstrate so clearly how hard it is to speak lines convincingly.  Lee Shaw as Hindley and Simone Jackson as Nelly Dean aren’t up to much either, although Oliver Milburn and Nichola Burley as the Lintons and Paul Hilton as Mr Earnshaw acquit themselves relatively well.  (The only actor I knew was Steve Evets, in the small part of the servant Joseph.)

Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is being greatly praised and many of the outdoor sequences are remarkable to look at:  unless the lighting is even more skilful than it appears, it must have taken the crew ages to wait for mists, sunsets and louring skies as perfectly apt as those we see.   There are fine human images too:  Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave, who play the teenage Catherine and Heathcliff, are natural camera subjects in a way their older counterparts never manage to be.  It’s no surprise that Arnold reprises, as a memory of the bereaved Heathcliff, the shot of Beer’s face, dappled with the mud that Heathcliff daubed over Cathy as they rolled around on the moor.  Arnold is better at remembering good shots than she is at sustaining themes.  When Heathcliff returns in his fine clothes, Hindley, now in straitened circumstances, on one occasion calls him, as he always did before, a ‘nigger’ but the abuse now lacks force and merely underlines the abuser’s powerlessness.  No one at Thrushcross Grange registers any surprise, let alone resentment, that a black man has made good.   Andrea Arnold appears to be interested in Heathcliff’s ethnicity only for as long as the opportunities are there to subject him to horribly cruel treatment.  On that subject:  Arnold’s Wuthering Heights presents several examples of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw but there’s one moment I found more troubling than any of these.  Hindley’s young son takes a pup and hangs it by its collar in the yard, and the wriggling dog yelps.   This may be one of the year’s finest bits of CGI trompe l’oeil.   But if this is a real dog in distress I hope the credits (I didn’t stay for them all) don’t claim that no animals were harmed in the making of this film.

13 November 2011