Wuthering Heights [Blu-ray]

Andrea Arnold's interpretation of the Bronte classic wins a few points for an attempt at presenting the story with a much more elemental and stripped down approach, but unfortunately really does fall quite flat due to some poor performances and a throughly anachronistic clash of styles and themes.

Arnold really wants us to smell the mud, study the movements of animals and get soaking wet in the endless rain, and there is some very interesting camera work, much of it handheld, utilised to try and achieve this. She really does come horribly unstuck, however, with a very ill-judged 4:3 frame, which robs the landscape of any depth of character or dimension and renders the humans characters as busy blurs within the frame for most of the running time. Her decision not to use any music on the soundtrack is also a mistake as the sound of rain or heavy breathing which fills up the spaces between dialogue becomes rather dully repetitive within the first 20 minutes of the film, and numbingly tedious thereafter.

The real let down of the film though is in the script and performances. Whilst realism is attempted through accurate regional accents, the dialogue and the very half-hearted attempt to lend it any feeling by the actors whatsoever, is absolutely dreadful. Whoever thought that adding in a stream of four-letter words and constant racial slurs was going to bring any added authenticity was sorely mistaken - this, as well as sentences that lack any sense of rhythm or phrasing, is where the film is most at fault, and there are horrid jarring notes of anachronism in practically every scene. Trying to force modern concerns and speech patterns into a classic gothic romance just kills it stone dead. The characters simply do not come across as people who lived 200 years ago, or people who are in any way experiencing the PASSION that lies at the very heart of Bronte's work. The grown-up Heathcliff frankly behaves as if his Prozac is having a bad effect whilst in borstal. Add to this costumes which are far too well-made and usually too clean in Arnold's muddy world, and you really have a very dissatisfying confusion of vision and style, which renders the film like a bizarre and immature version of 'Kes' as costume drama, and without any of the glorious energy, spontaneity or TRUTH that Ken Loach's masterpiece achieved in every frame.

If you are going to strip out all of Bronte's inaugural allusions to good and evil, God and the Devil, the domestic and the truly wild (passion that is), and the ghostly Gothic atmosphere of the hunter haunted, and replace all of that with some very half-assed and shallow scenes of dull and dreary misery (half of which is pathetically unbelievable anyway), why on earth bother to claim you are making a version of Wuthering Heights?

Not interesting enough to be travesty, but dull enough to be relegated to the dustbin.

I have read Wuthering Heights numerous times for the past twenty years, always loved it, and was very excited about seeing Andrea Arnold's rendition of it, whose films I had just recently started to enjoy (Fishtank, Red Road). I could not have been more disappointed.

Leaving aside the utterly cheap attempt at originality by casting a black Heathcliff when Emily Bronte calls Heathcliff a "gypsy" numerous times throughout the book, the adult Heathcliff (James Howson) lacked entirely the animal power, intelligence and fierceness associated with the character as Cathy puts it in the novel: "he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man". Instead his performance was that of an effeminate, sullen, lifeless creature, whose attractive atributes remained thoroughly hidden.

His Catherine was in short, not Catherine,(Kaya Scodelario), and the only glimpse of that character to be seen was in the younger Cathy (Shannon Beer).

In Andrea Arnold's previous films I admired her vision of beauty in ordinary every day things, even the more gritty aspects of life, here however, the incessant rolling in dirt seen through the tiresomely shaking hand held camera effect is bound to wear one out sooner or later. If making a classical story more "contemporary" and "real" means endless, tedious images of filth and grime, not discussed in the original novel, please take me back to the more outdated approach, any day!

Another incredibly annoying aspect of the film is the butchering of the language, apparently still all in the cause of the contemporary crucade. The language of the book itself is simply so perfect and beautiful that all you have to do is preserve it in the scripts, somehow however screen writers and directors always think that they are going to "improve" it by cutting it backwards and forwards, and in the case of this film, adding dozens of f... words. The unique thing about "Wuthering Heights" is that it is "Wuthering Heights". If they really think they are making it "better" by these kind of absurdities, perhaps they need to find a different story to work with.

Lastly, when Emily Bronte called Heathcliff a gypsy, she meant a gypsy. With that connotation come all sorts of associations of wildness, sensuality, thievery, unreliability etc. which are relevant in the cultural context of the story as well as the painting of Heathcliff's character. When changed into a black person, the web of cultural associations as well as the underpinnings of the character change entirely and make Heathcliff into something which obviously Emily Bronte never intended. How about film makers try to trust that Emily Bronte knew her own mind and try for once to represent her will faithfully instead of boosting up their own egos with claims of so called originality and contemporary approach?

If you want to see a good rendering of Wuthering Heights, try rather the Ralph Fiennes version or the latest Tom Hardy, both of which infinately superior.

Where to start...I am a massive wuthering heights fan and have watched every film adaption of the novel. This has to be the worst one i have ever seen.

The acting - abysmal. So much so that at times I had to remember that I was not watching a children's school play but yes in fact someone had bothered making a film of this. Honestly don't know who was worse.

The story - clearly no plan to stick to the original sequence of events and felt rushed in parts. Like Frances' labour scene. The Poor woman was in a coffin before she'd even finished giving birth. Which leads on to another point; the book is about wuthering heights yet very little is seen of the house. For example, frances and hindley's baby is conceived and born in a field...I'm sure that has some deep artistic meaning but like the rest of the film it wasn't worth the effort of thinking about.

There are some nice shots of the moors so you get a good idea of the setting but if that's what you're after then save yourself the pain and just google them.

All in all, a terrible film with terrible actors that probably shouldn't have been made.