17.11.2011

Love, mud and misery in Yorkshire

Jim Moody reviews Andrea Arnold's (director) 'Wuthering Heights' 2011, general release

Emile Brontë’s visceral creation, in which struggling humanity faces the alienation and poverty of Yorkshire country life over 200 years ago, is given a powerful moving image realisation in this most recent version of her work.

The fascination of the subject matter does not pall even after all this time. Sadly, this film only covers around half of what was Emily Brontë’s only novel; in doing so it portrays just the chronologically first section of the story. But the theme of revenge that is at its core shines through.

It might seem rather strange to those familiar with the novel that the story is here told by Heathcliff, while the book’s narrators, servant Nelly (Simone Jackson) and Mr Lockwood, are respectively demoted or removed altogether from the storyline. Part of the reason for this, especially with respect to Lockwood, is the excision of the later part of the tale, something shared by most film versions.

Here, we commence with paterfamilias Mr Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) bringing home a vagrant boy from Liverpool, whom he calls Heathcliff (Solomon Glave). As we know from the novel, this had been the name of a son of the Earnshaws who died in childhood.

As soon as he arrives, Brontë has characters berate Heathcliff as a ‘gypsy’, but she also has him speak ‘gibberish’. ‘Gypsy’ has long been used as an omnibus term of denigration. The fact that here Heathcliff is a black, probably African youngster fits exactly with his evident outsider status and matches the spirit of Brontë’s characterisation to a T.

Thus is the scene set for the contrasting love and abominations that Heathcliff is to experience. Earnshaw senior’s teenage son, Hindley (Lee Shaw), detests him for stealing his father’s affections; conversely, his daughter, Catherine (Shannon Beer), grows close. This plays out in Hindley brutalising Heathcliff, while Catherine feels his pain. Catherine and Heathcliff gambol about the fields, heathland and rocky outcrops together, becoming inseparable playmates: sex does not appear to be an overt complication.

Overall, Andrea Arnold’s direction is decidedly to go with the flow in terms of the drear nature of Georgian country life. Much of the time the farmhouse at Wuthering Heights is surrounded by a sea of mud and quite possibly has some compacted earthen floors. Illumination that can only come from the sun or from poor substitutes such as penny candles or rush lights must of necessity curtail family and social activity. Early rising to carry on the drudgery of farming around Halifax is the concomitant of early sleeping.

While Wuthering Heights may not actually have been shot in ambient light, it does give an impression that it has. A general murkiness surrounds the farm and this mood echoes the bad treatment that Heathcliff receives once Hindley inherits the farm from his late father. Possibly having been enslaved before Mr Earnshaw found him, as slash scars across his back seem to suggest, Heathcliff now almost becomes one again; Hindley has him lashed by a farmhand when he thinks he is not working hard enough on the land.

When Catherine is taken in by nearby scions of a higher echelon of society, the Lintons, she is separated from her quondam soulmate, who mopes and falls more under Hindley’s sway in the absence of his would-be protector. When she comes back to the farm a month or so later, Catherine has aped the Lintons, taking on airs and graces and the clothes to go with them, which prompts Heathcliff into a peremptory bout of bad manners that cause him more pain and suffering at the hands of her brother.

A couple of years go by and Catherine becomes much closer to Edgar Linton (Oliver Milburn), eventually agreeing to marry him. Mishearing Catherine’s reason for not wanting to marry him, Heathcliff has little reason to stay. When he can, Heathcliff flees Wuthering Heights.

A common rendition of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as only a kind of love story is absent here, which may act as a useful restorative toward the novel’s original dual themes of love and revenge, and the harms produced as a result. By the end of this telling, Heathcliff has exacted vengeance on Hindley, who actually hurt him, and Catherine, whom he tragically and mistakenly felt sorely slighted by, but who was undeserving of the fate served her. We get sour, unsatisfying revenge, justified and unjustified.

Altogether, indeed, Arnold’s pitch is a better match to the world of the times portrayed so well in the original work than any imagining that forgets how pain can adversely affect the human soul.