More UK opinions about Wuthering Heights 2009 (II)

The New Statesman reviews Wuthering Heights 2009. Rachel Cooke is not very enthusiastic about this adaptation but she thinks Tom Hardy makes the perfect Heathcliff:

I have never seen a successful film or television version of Emily Brontë's only novel, and I do not expect that I ever will. Its complex structure, its poetry, strangeness and extreme violence work only on the page. Lose them, as any screenwriter inevitably will, and all you are left with is a bewildering, semi-sadomasochistic relationship and a few moody shots of the Yorkshire moors. Where's the shock and awe in that?
Peter Bowker is a writer whose finest work is all his own (Blackpool, Occupation). When he starts messing with real people (Desperate Romantics),or someone else's stuff (A Christmas Carol), things go a bit wrong. His screenplay for Wuthering Heights (30 and 31 August, 9pm) took huge liberties with the novel, and though I do not object to this in principle, refusing to be a slave to your Penguin Classic is a problem when you are dealing with a book as singular as Wuthering Heights.
I am not going to list every change here. I am not some possessive Brontë nerd, and this is supposed to be a TV review, not lit crit. Suffice to say that his "improvements" ranged from excising the novel's most troubling violence (I guess that puppy killing, one of Heathcliff's - and Hareton's - more casual crimes, would not have gone down a bundle with a commissioning editor in search of bank holiday treats) to smoothing out its elaborate time shifts (Nelly Dean, played by Sarah Lancashire, was here a minor character rather than the story's narrator).
Result? Wuthering Heights-lite: less absorbingly queer than the real deal, and yet, paradoxically, infinitely more perplexing. You need to know an awful lot about Catherine and Heathcliff - not least that they shared a bedroom until they were 13 - even to half grasp why their wolfish, incestuous passion persists. Bowker, in his effort to move the action politely on, told us only that they were both a little wild.
Oh, well. I am glad I watched it all the same; though it is certainly getting ever more difficult to ignore the way Andrew Lincoln, who played Edgar Linton, can do only one accent (Mancunian-ish), and that his performances involve much wiggling of his eyebrows and very little else. If casting failed with him - as it possibly did with Lancashire - it succeeded spectacularly with both Burn Gorman as Hindley and Tom Hardy as Heathcliff.
Gorman, so quirky and affecting as Mr Guppy in the BBC's peerless adaptation of Bleak House, is a brilliant actor. His Hindley, a famous brute and the engine that powers the more wanton spite of his adoptive brother, Heathcliff, was mesmerisingly nasty. As for Hardy, he was the best Heathcliff I have seen. I must admit, however, that during his first few moments on screen, I was worried that he was playing him as Marco-Pierre White in riding boots, gangster-ish and quixotic. Heathcliff is no mere gangster, but a devil. As Nelly says of him in the novel, "I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species.
"There is something about Hardy's mouth - perhaps it is the unsettling contrast between his soft, pillowy lips and the teeth that they conceal, which look like mossy, tumbledown gravestones - that has you hanging on his every word, menace mingling with charm like the scent of cat's piss on roses. Thanks to him, little was required of Charlotte Riley's Catherine, beautiful and spirited though she was. I could not properly fathom her relationship with this particular Heathcliff, and I knew, both as a reader and as a viewer, that important details were being withheld. But, on the other hand, I sure as hell did not want their love to end.
It is quite impossible to tear your eyes from Hardy, and when the titles rolled, I felt his loss.

The Bath Chronicle has a more positive opinion:

Like I suspect many of you, I spent three very pleasant hours of my bank holiday weekend lapping up the latest television "classics-in-a- nutshell" version of Wuthering Heights. This was a first class production with an excellent script and some superb acting. I enjoyed it immensely.
Apart from one thing. Despite my best endeavours, I couldn't stop thinking as I was watching the programme about a somewhat quirky big-haired lady singer from the 1980s.
As I'm sure many of you will recall, the enigmatic Kate Bush had a massive number one hit with the song Wuthering Heights and because that tune is so much a part of my cultural subconscious, I was just waiting for the line "Heathcliff! It's me, your Cathy, I've come home, I'm so co-oo-oo-ld, let me in-a your window. " Which never arrived.
Apart from completely over- romanticising Heathcliff (who was actually somewhat of a bad egg) this song is just one of many examples of what I call P.C.R.C. (Popular Culture Rewriting Classics). (...)
But returning to Wuthering Heights, I do think that even if popular culture does sometimes add just a bit of extra spice, if it helps make people interested in the classics it has to be a good thing. So Emily, say a big thank you to Kate . . . (Sam Holliday)

Another positive review can be read on Cultural Blabbage:

Actually, although at times it felt like someone was dying/crying every five seconds, this was a good old romp through Emily Bronte’s classic, with performances from Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley that were consistently engaging and, occasionally, surprising.

And another negative one can be seen on the Saga Zone blog:

I am glad that I'd seen the original film, and also glad that I have the novel. I rated this production low by way of characterisation, acting, set, and direction. Not enamoured. The attempt to show Thruscross Grange was banal, I thought. (kam.sn1)

Check more on the imdb forum, Yahoo Brontë list, ...

EDIT: The Independent also features some net opinions about the series.

The Times Higher Education:

Reading the greats of English literature, perhaps? ITV's offering for the Bank Holiday was Peter Bowker's adaptation of Wuthering Heights (Sunday 30 August, 9pm). The opening shots seemed to be a dog's-eye view of the moors as it trotted through the heather. A dog bites Cathy's leg at Thrushcross Grange and dogs greet the sickly Linton Heathcliff when he is delivered into the hands of his father. Was this a bold attempt to alert us to the novel's hitherto undetected canine subtext? Years ago, I had a tutor who demonstrated to a spellbound audience that Wuthering Heights was about the establishment of bourgeois discourse. Heady stuff.
But, to adapt Cathy's famous cry, criticism is like the "foliage in the woods"; art is the "eternal rocks beneath". What remains are not the interpretations, however ingenious, but the words and images, the things that seize hold, never let go and grow with you. It was all here. The cloud-heavy sky, the bleak landscape and Wuthering Heights itself: shadowy, angular, enduring. A place where tears fall on stone.
The cast had to work hard to compete with the setting. Some of them couldn't even manage the Yorkshire accent. Tom Hardy was a "new man" Heathcliff. His face, instead of one scoured by wind and rough weather, was an advert for Nivea. He and Edgar, played by Andrew Lincoln, never looked as if they wanted to bash each other, just swap tips on aftershave lotions. But there was no denying the chemistry between Heathcliff and Cathy. Like DNA, it's immortal. (Gary Day)

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights