Still debating gritty Wuthering Heights

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights continues being an object of interest for reviewers and journalists.

The Herald is proud of the Scottish roots of the production:

Rae’s company Ecosse Films is the force behind Wuthering Heights, one of the most eagerly anticipated competition films on the Lido, the long, thin island home of the festival. It’s quite a heady prospect: a literary classic, directed by Andrea Arnold, whose breakthrough feature Red Road was set in Glasgow and who is regarded as one of the world’s most talented directors. (Indeed, by the end of the week, the film’s promise was realised as Wuthering Heights went on to win the festival’s coveted prize for Best Cinematography.)
Rae and his partner Robert Bernstein – whose films include their first, lauded Mrs Brown and the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy – had been developing a new adaptation of Emily Bronte’s gothic masterpiece for four years, with a few directors in mind, when Arnold got in touch and expressed her own passion for the book.
“Andrea’s the last person I would have expected to take on a classic novel like this,” says Rae, “because she makes her own films, with her own stories, about things that she’s passionate about. But it turned out she’s been thinking of making this movie for 25 years. So to get Andrea on board was extraordinary. From our point of view as a company, it was an amazing piece of alchemy – because if you’re going to be crazy enough to take on Wuthering Heights, you’ve got to do it with a director who says something very different. And Andrea has brought a truthfulness that’s been missing in previous versions, particularly by choosing young people as Heathcliffe [sic] and the younger Cathy who had not acted before.” (Demetrios Matheou)

Insider Media also boasts about the Yorkshire roots in the film:

A production of Emily Brontë's classic Wuthering Heights backed by Screen Yorkshire has scooped accolades at an international film festival.
Wuthering Heights was shot throughout North Yorkshire and supported by Screen Yorkshire, which invested in the production as well as providing crewing and locations support.
Andrea Arnold's interpretation of Wuthering Heights has won Best Cinematography at the 68th Venice International Film Festival with the Yorkshire landscape being described as "another character".
Locations that feature in the film include: Thwaite, Cotescue Park, Coverham, and Moor Close Farm, Muker, Swaledale.
Hugo Heppell, head of production at Screen Yorkshire, said: "Andrea was absolute in her desire to make the film in Yorkshire and this award shows how important it was to her vision for this unique film. We are looking forward to this film being talked about throughout the autumn."

The Globe and Mail gives the film three out of four stars and reviews it briefly:

Andrea Arnold’s take-no-prisoners adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic is sure to divide audiences and critics. Set against an intimidating backdrop of bleak moorland, muddy yard and barren house of cold stone and creaking wood, it argues the novel’s chief theme is the way cruelty is handed down from one generation to the next. It includes hand-held camera work, a halting pace, scant dialogue, regular expletives, one scene of animalistic sex and several of animals being killed, and features neophyte actors playing the young Catherine and both versions of Heathcliff, who is black. Its singular and unflinching vision is always admirable and often breathtaking. Unfortunately, the film fails in its second half where a bland Catherine (Kaya Scodelario) and a blank Heathcliff (James Howson) never ignite the passion that should be the counterweight to all that pain. (Kate Taylor)

LA Weekly's Style Council discusses the film:

Wuthering Heights is more of a mixed bag. While Andrea Arnold's take on Emily Brontë's novel has attracted attention for Arnold's casting of two black actors as the child and twenty-something versions of romantic anti-hero Heathcliff, the filmmaker's choice to bookend her adaptation with Heathcliff's arrival on the Earnshaw farm and his assumption of its lease--thus omitting about 20 chapters -- is perhaps just as radical.
Even within this truncated version of Bronte's epic, Arnold is uninterested in linear storytelling. The film's first half is thick with gorgeous, often screen-filling, shots of mud, livestock, insects, hair, grass--all conduits for Catherine and Heathcliff's unspoken but unmistakable attraction. Then, following Brontë, there's a temporal ellipsis, after which older actors assume the lead roles, weakening our relationship to the characters and opening the door to some jarring histrionics.
I admire Arnold's talent and instincts as an extraordinarily visual filmmaker, but her cutaways can verge on self-parody, and after so much of the movie works to channel feelings through non-literal imagery, the final act's big-acting melodrama feels unearned. (Karina Longworth)

And so does IndieWire's Women and Hollywood:

[Andrea Arnold's] third [film] Wuthering Heights premiered last week at the Venice Film Festival to very good notices. I caught it yesterday in Toronto and was surprisingly left underwhelmed.
Arnold takes a bold approach to the film and adds another whole layer to the story by making Heathcliff black throwing the race card into the piece. And she layers the film with lots of imagery of birds and butterflies flying to freedom, yet there are way too many images of trees shaking in the wind. I never felt that Arnold was a self-indulgent director before this film, I felt her films were beautiful because they were raw, because they were real.
Not this time. I give Arnold major props for directing rookie actors and for discovering new talent. She directed Michael Fassbender in Fish Tank before he exploded as a big star and you could see even then the talent this guy had. I’m still glad to have seen the film and I am still a great fan of Arnold’s even though this wasn’t my favorite film of hers. (Melissa Silverstein)

The Seattle Times's Popcorn and Prejudice sums up the atmosphere in Toronto:

the TIFF crowd is still debating Andrea Arnold's gritty "Wuthering Heights" (though I'm hearing mostly positive comments) (Moira Macdonald)

Morning Star looks back at the Venice Film Festival:

Of the British trio in this year's competition, Robbie Ryan won the best cinematography award for Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic novel.
Though ostensibly a costume drama, the story lends itself to contemporary themes such as racism and dependency while touching on perennial ones such as jealousy and hatred of others.
The landscape is the ideal backdrop and one of the major protagonists of this cruel and passionate story.
Arnold's film is idiosyncratically gothic, feminist, socialist, violent and visceral - a five-star film.
Not to be missed when it goes on general release. (Rita di Santo)

The British Society of Cinematographers congratulates Robbie Ryan for his award.

Off Off Broadway World features Paul Dick's newest musical, Moses, My Love, and looks back on previous musicals by him, such as Wuthering Heights, a Romantic Musical.

His last production was a revival of his "Wuthering Heights, a Romantic Musical" at the Mint Theatre Space in June, 2010. Deirdre Donovan (TheatreScene.net) wrote, "it demolishes the myth that musicals with a literary source always dilute their origins....A lot of musicals run out of steam. But not this one. Abetted by the solid acting of its large cast (including 3 children), the show has no dull spots." The review concluded, "Brontë brought to her novel a morAl Anger at injustice, a compassion for the dispossessed, and an acute awareness of the inflexibility of social classes circa 1790. The highest compliment I can pay to this production is that I don't think Emily Bronte herself would have felt that her material had been tarnished or betrayed."

The Times mentions the fact that Wuthering Heights was one of Neda Agha-Soltan's favourite books.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Wuthering Heights