It was well done

Three quite different reviews of Wuthering Heights 2009 appear today in the press. The Telegraph clearly approves the adaptation:

The great temptation with Heathcliff is to play him as a complete stranger to the razor, the hairbrush, the trouser press and the deodorant stick – turning him in the process into one of those Bigfoot creatures who appear, always in frustratingly blurry footage, hanging round the refuse bins in American national parks. But Tom Hardy’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (Sunday and Monday, ITV1) was rather different.
He was clean-shaven for a start and his hair, while understandably a little tousled by all those moorland breezes, was not the usual thicket of mattress-stuffing. Although there was plenty of darkness and fury here, Peter Bowker’s script and Hardy’s performance gave Heathcliff a lot else as well: playfulness, humour and, most interesting of all, nervousness. In this version it was Cathy (Charlotte Riley) as the daughter of the house who was the impulsive and combustible one, while Heathcliff, at least to begin with, followed slavishly in her wake.
It was also prepared to take risks. Rather than tapping discreetly on Heathcliff’s bedroom window at the start, Cathy’s hand shot right through the glass. Soon afterwards, Heathcliff frantically dug up Cathy’s grave and tore the lid off her coffin. First, we saw Cathy through Heathcliff’s eyes – unchanged – and then as she really was – a decaying skeleton. Back and forth the perspective went, almost as if it was hammering nails into Heathcliff’s grief. And then right at the end, Heathcliff committed suicide – rather than perishing from some unspecified complaint as he does in the book.
I can’t say any of these changes bothered me. Indeed, within the confines of a three-hour drama, they made perfectly good sense.
Director Coky Giedroyc has already proved – most notably with her TV production of Oliver Twist and in Fear of Fanny about Fanny Cradock – that she’s unusually good at creating texture. Everything here felt properly rich and dark without ever shading into gothic excess. The casting too was spot-on – Burn Gorman’s Hindley was superb, a man so curdled that even his hair appeared to be dripping with sourness.
But then I doubt if you’ll see a better, and a more introspective, Heathcliff than Tom Hardy’s, or indeed a more affecting Cathy than Charlotte Riley’s. As she vacillated between kindly Edgar (Andrew Lincoln) and the primeval pull of Heathcliff, Riley’s determined jaw swung confusedly between the two.
In a lot of respects, of course, Heathcliff and Cathy are a revolting couple – violently solipsistic and always banging on about their elemental passions. If they were your neighbours you’d want as much moorland between you and them as possible. Yet it’s this twinge of repulsion that helps to give Wuthering Heights its power and that sent such tremors through 19th-century England. More than 150 years later, it’s still capable of delivering a hefty thump both to the heart and to the solar plexus. (John Preston)

The Financial Times's review is also positive:

Wuthering Heights (ITV Sunday, Monday) must be among the most “read” books in English, that is, both popular and subject to many critical interpretations. That it is the supreme expression of romantic love between a rebellious young woman and a Byronic hero is not wholly wrong; but it is Romantic capitalised, shaped by Emily Brontë out of extensive reading unusual for a vicar’s daughter in mid-19th century Yorkshire, and out of an imagination working within the limits of a family she could not bear to leave and a backdrop of moorland which, in the course of her walks, that imagination peopled.
And those people! The programme did them well. Heathcliff, played by Tom Hardy, was handsome but also brutish in looks, a mouth that could be sensuous, cruel and slobbering in turn, his obsession narrowing his feelings so that all others but Catherine are aggravations. She was striking, spirited and narcissistic, unable to comprehend that her self-abnegation in Heathcliff – “I am him” – could not be understood to cancel all else, including her marriage to the gentle – again, in both senses – Edgar Linton, whose Thrushcross Grange is well conceived as the Enlightenment counterpoint to the Gothic Heights. In the first, there are ladies sewing in the drawing room; in the second, there is raving, drunkenness, scourging and endless cruelty.
It loses much, of course – including , the innocent idiot first narrator, who sets the story off, striving to fit Heathcliff and his “family” into an ordered universe by assigning them roles they had long since refused to play, only to realise, through a servant who picks up the narration, that he has come to live among passion and savagery. But the servant, Nelly (Sarah Lancashire), is made a major figure, trapped in service to a crooked branch of humanity that her workaday decency cannot make straight.
It was well done; invested with a certain external poignancy, since if ITV continues to falter financially we will see fewer and fewer of such fine and expensive things. Yet towards the end, the well-worn quip of Oscar Wilde’s on the death of Little Nell surfaced. As the ethereal part became stronger, and the ghostly visitations of the dead Cathy returned, the clash of the Gothic moorlands’ Sturm und Drang with modern urban sensibility prompted at least an inward snigger. The only way to “read” it is to surrender: trying, like the absent Lockwood, to fit it into today, is to dilute and lose it. (John Lloyd)

The News & Star holds a quite different opinion:

To the credit of Emily Bronte’s literary genius, there hasn’t yet been a satisfactory screen adaptation of her haunting love and loss classic, Wuthering Heights.
Sunday’s latest attempt from ITV1 came closer than most – but it wasn’t without its problems.
Biggest of those was Heathcliffe – he’s always difficult. Transporting the moody, brooding, charismatic hero from printed page – and imagination in overdrive – to film is obviously impossible. None has managed it yet.
“I am Heathcliffe!” Cathy Earnshaw wails when she confesses all-consuming love for her darkly passionate soul mate.
So are we all. Lovers of the book see him in mind’s eye, know him intimately, adore and fear him uniquely. Because nothing ever comes close to mind’s eye, Heathcliffe can never be adequately duplicated.
It was clear early on in this lavish, polished two-parter that the pale faced, blue eyed, fine featured Tom Hardy couldn’t hold a candle to Emily Bronte’s dark skinned, wildly free-spirited, testosterone driven original – supposedly from Romany origins.
Emily’s Heathcliffe oozed raw sexual energy, was frighteningly emotional, brutally driven and vengeful. Tom Hardy’s Heathcliffe was rude, bad tempered, bordering on petulant and at times a bit of a twit, actually.
Charlotte Riley though was an impressive embodiment of Cathy. Young, impetuous, desperately in love (but hormonally) selfish, demanding and silly. Catherine Earnshaw never gets the screen portrayal she deserves from productions missing the point that she was her own worst enemy – and these days would have been collecting Asbos from age nine. Here was the exception to that disappointing rule.
Edgar Linton – Heathcliffe’s adversary and rival for Cathy’s love – was played in refreshingly different style by Andrew Lincoln.
So often seen as a blonde, foppish wimp with nothing much beyond money to recommend him as husband material, here he was gentlemanly and sensitive, thoughtful and forgiving. How else could he have turned Miss Earnshaw’s head?
Award-winning writer Peter Bowker’s intelligent adaptation coaxed out of the Bronte original timeless commentaries on the awful consequences of abuse, the heart-hardening effects of greed and the self-destructive nature of revenge.
Much more than all that though, it retold one of the greatest love stories in English literature beautifully and without stooping to modern cliche.
Skipping a weighty chunk of the book may have left some viewers confused over relationships between the young Earnshaws and Lintons but even so, this was a classy piece of work. (Anne Pickles)

EDIT: thecustard.tv also posts today a review of the series:

Sometimes an actor can be just too good. As Heathcliff, Tom Hardy bestrode this beguiling adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic (and only) novel so imperiously it was sometimes a wonder that in his wake he wasn’t followed by a troop of Panzers. (Luke)

And we also have Caitlin Moran's review for The Times. The reviewer thinks that her writing qualifies her to consider Wuthering Heights a second-rate novel. After that you cannot but feel compassion for such a deranged mind. Poor girl, after all she has her moments of clarity and finally makes a sort of good review:

In contrast, Tom Hardy as Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights, Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday, ITV1) wasn’t initially half so attractive. First, you got the feeling that he’d be rubbish at knocking up a lime, mint, chilli, coriander and tomatillo dressing while providing emotional succour in the ghetto. And, second, Hardy had elected to play him with a bewildering Mancunian boom, unnervingly reminiscent of Paul Calf’s “posh student” voice. You kept expecting him to shout: “Ahm going to do mah dissertation on you, Cath-ay.”
On top of this, the opening act was a mess of time-shift, shouting and a wildly coiffed Heathcliff stomping around, breaking in a new wig for Colleen Nolan. By the time that Cathy’s dead phosphorescent-green hand punched through the window, and Heathcliff had climbed into her coffin to get off with her skeleton, it had all started to feel like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It was hard to see how a writer as good as Peter Bowker (Occupation) and an actor as scorchingly magnificent as Hardy (The Take, Bronson) were turning in such a bag of cack. At 9.15pm on Twitter, half the people I was watching it with had bunked off to Big Brother.
But, in the kind of form-reversal one associates with the last ten minutes of Rocky, by the third ad break Wuthering Heights had kicked in viciously. Bowker’s script suddenly moved sideways, focused and accelerated like a UFO, making what is, let’s face it, a pretty second-rate book (the Brotherhood of Man to Jane Eyre’s Abba) into a satisfying causal torrent of tragedy, ending in Cathy’s death and — in an iconoclastic rewrite — Heathcliff’s suicide.
Hardy persistently refused the easy way with his Heathcliff, usually played as a default Yorkshire caveman who shouts a lot. Instead, Hardy’s Heathcliff was clever, redeemable, merciless, sly — and dizzyingly, helplessly undone in his every thought about Cathy.
Charlotte Riley’s Cathy, meanwhile, ran wild on the moors, ate Heathcliff like syllabub and had all the forward planning of a cat. Her idea was to marry Linton’s money and install Heathcliff as her bit on the side. Unfortunately but inevitably, Heathcliff got fatally lemon about this dim ruse, and, two hours of emotional sadism later, Sarah Lancashire had buried them both: greedy, self-immolating children that they were.
Over its two hours, Wuthering Heights was almost as compelling and succinct a telling of the story as “Heathcliff / It’s me, your Cathy, I’ve come home / So cooOOOld / Let me in-a-your windooo-o-o-o.” And that is, obviously, pretty immense praise.
Of course, when Heathcliff begged Cathy to come back from the dead to haunt him it was with some of the most affecting lines (“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! Haunt me, then! Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”) in British literature.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights