Wuthering Heights in Venice. Reactions (II) ~ BrontëBlog

Picture: Solomon Glave, James Howson, Arnold, Kaya Scodelario, Shannon Beer
Photograph: Andrea Merola/EPA

Positive:
The Guardian:

Full credit to director Andrea Arnold for taking such a bold and distinctive approach to Emily Brontë's account of sweeping passion on the Yorkshire moors. Her line in creative vandalism rips off the layers of fluffy chiffon that have adhered to the tale through the course of numerous stage and screen adaptations. It pushes the story all the way back to its original 1847 incarnation and then beyond, up-river, into primordial sludge. What comes back is a beautiful rough beast of a movie, a costume drama like no other. This might not be warm, or even approachable, but it is never less than bullishly impressive.
In Arnold's version, Heathcliff (played as a boy by Solomon Glave and in adulthood by James Howson) is a black runaway, plucked off the streets of Liverpool and raised on a north country hill farm. As youngsters, Heathcliff and Cathy (played first by Shannon Beer and then by Kaya Scoledario) exist in a kind of primitive Eden where they are neither quite siblings or lovers but some innocent hybrid of the two. It cannot last. Cathy is parcelled off to the local manor house where she reluctantly agrees to marry the foppish, insubstantial Edgar Linton (James Northcote). Heathcliff, meanwhile, is first abused and then later cast out by his brutish adoptive brother. He returns wealthy and hardened, hell-bent on revenge and still longing for Cathy.
Arnold shoots much of the action on hand-held camera, with sun-spots on the lens and the wind booming off the microphone.(...)
What I found more of a problem was the faint stiffness and self-consciousness of the acting and the crucial lack of chemistry between the adult Heathcliff and Cathy. We need to believe in this love in order for Arnold's gloriously bruised and brooding vision to properly hit home and I never did, quite. (Xan Brooks)

The Hollywood Reporter:

As refreshing as a dawn walk in winter on the Yorkshire moors, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights shows how 21st century cinema can — and should — go about boldly revitalizing even the most familiar literary properties.
That said, the film’s audacious unconventionality and a cast headed by a quartet of total unknowns make it, on paper at least, a tough commercial sell. But such is the enduring power of Wuthering Heights as a popular cultural phenomenon that, aided by what is likely to be very strong critical reactions and a healthy awards haul, there’s no reason why director/co-writer Arnold’s third feature shouldn’t prove an international arthouse success in the mold of her last effort, Fish Tank (2009). (...)
Performances are blunt and unmannered. Top-billed Kaya Scodelario plays the adult Cathy with only the occasional linguistic anachronism jarring on the ear. These minor flubs are outweighed by the impact of the plausibly unadorned, sometimes vicious language used by what are essentially uneducated working-class farmers. This includes several four-letter outbursts and a smattering of uses (by Hindley) of the N-word towards Heathcliff – Glave and Howson are both black, a pioneering bit of casting from Arnold.
One of the themes of both book and film is the contrast between wildness and civilization – Heathcliff and Cathy’s happiest times are spent exploring the muddily picturesque moors – and Heathcliff always retains his close bond with nature and the earth. This is powerfully conveyed by Arnold and her cinematographer Robbie Ryan through the close attention they pay to the flora and fauna of this remote corner of Yorkshire.(...)
Arnold’s only real misstep is the inclusion of a newly-commissioned, unmistakably modern sounding song by popular British neo-folk band Mumford & Sons during the final moments and over the closing credits. What Arnold doesn’t include, however, is the second half of the book. Like almost all screen adaptations, the action ends shortly after Cathy’s death. (Neil Young)

Mostly positive:
Movie Line:

Two hours after seeing Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, screening here in competition, I’m still fighting my way across this rugged moor of a movie, a vast, wild place where Arnold’s vision and Emily Brontë’s meet eye to eye and claw to claw. Arnold’s reading of Bronte’s weird, unabashedly sick novel is daring for sure: This is a film filled with interesting choices that, in the end, may not be all that interesting — it’s more self-conscious than Arnold’s other films, Red Road and Fish Tank, perhaps partly because, unlike those movies, it’s based on familiar source material. (...)
The earthiness of Arnold’s approach — she cowrote this adaptation with Olivia Hetreed — does amount to a degree of pretension: Her choices are so bold and definitive that you’re always aware of them as filmic choices. She subjects us to on-screen killings of sheep and rabbits (the latter reminiscent of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien) and, for my taste, there’s one too many puppy-hangings (though I’m sure that, unlike that sheep and that rabbit, the dogs were rescued in real life before succumbing). And in the end, I didn’t get the emotional charge from Wuthering Heights that I was waiting for, hoping for. But it’s certainly one of the thorniest and most thought-provoking films of the festival. And although it’s been some 25 years since I read the book, I was surprised at the way Arnold reminded me of its unnerving emotional undercurrents, and of Bronte’s mystical-brutal view of the presence of nature in love and sex. As literary adaptations go, it’s both doggedly faithful and willfully untamed — a movie that’s hard, maybe, to love, but easy to respect. (Stephanie Zacharek)

The Telegraph:

Nature is the true star of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, a raw and affecting adaptation that will bring a new audience to the Brontë story. Windswept moors have never looked as bleak as they do here, nor as rain-sodden. The Yorkshire Tourist Board shouldn’t expect a boost in visitor numbers.
The characters don’t battle against the harsh environment, but have become a part of it. This is a brutal world far removed from cosy period drama. “F--- off, you c----,” is Heathcliff’s greeting for the Linton family when they pay a visit. Strip away the costumes and these could be the inhabitants of a modern-day sink estate.
Dialogue is spare, Arnold preferring to focus her shaky, handheld camera on the natural world. There are lots of close-ups of butterflies and beetles. Barking dogs and whistling wind supply the soundtrack.
The second half is weak by comparison, as the adult Heathcliff (James Howson) returns to find Cathy married. Howson gives a creditable performance for someone making his acting debut but fails to convey his character’s tortured soul. His scenes with Kaya Scodelario as the older Cathy are decently done but don’t pack an emotional punch. (Anita Singh)

The Times:

Wuthering Heights has been pared back to its dark, earthy roots by the radical British director Andrea Arnold, who has cast a mixed-race actor in the role of Heathcliff for the first time. Her staging is experimental too, with cinematography which reminded me most of Terrence Malick’s, with its pagan, visceral connection to the elements, and long pauses on things of beauty – or horror. (...)
The story is told entirely from Heathcliff’s point of view, favouring the inarticulate and brutish over the romantic. The dialogue is Spartan, and at first the 14-year-old urchin rescued from the streets of Liverpool is incomprehensible. The Yorkshire accents of the rest of the cast are thick as muck, and they swear like troopers. Heathcliff getsshare of abuse, particularly from Hindley, who looks and acts like a skinhead. In one scene Heathcliff is whipped against the wall like a slave, until blood soaks the back of his shirt. The film focuses mostly on Heathcliff and Cathy’s childhood, and Shannon Beer plays the young girl with a round-faced, pink-cheeked, punkish honesty. (...)
Howson does his best as Heathcliff, but while physically convincing in the part, he delivers his lines with a stiff discomfort. Keeping the casting young in line with the fact that Cathy died at 19, Kaya Scodelario from Skins plays the older heroine. (...)
There is also no music in this film, other than occasional hymns or singing from the cast. The silence pushes the roar of nature to the fore, the wind slashing the trees, the incessant tapping on the window, and the near-gunfire of the constant downpours. Over the credits Arnold has commissioned a song from Mumford and Sons.
This risky adaptation will not please the popcorn audience. It demands too much time and concentration, and the film is flawed in the second half, though not fatally so. But for its wildly irreverent rethink of a great work of literature, and Robbie Ryan’s glorious photography, Wuthering Heights deserves respect. (Kate Muir)

Negative:
Variety:

An admirable attempt to strip the story of "Wuthering Heights" down to its barest, most primal elements, helmer Andrea Arnold's first period feature and first adaptation of another writer's work is unfortunately more interesting in theory than it is to watch. Working with mostly non-professional thesps whose inexperience drains away much of the material's intrinsic passion, pic is dramatically flat and almost stylized in its austere excision of dialogue, non-source music and, strangest of all given the book's romantic rep, overt love scenes. Helmer's name and the title alone will guarantee distribution, but "Wuthering" won't reach arthouse B.O. heights. (...)

However, the casting also chips away at the realism, as it becomes more implausible that Heathcliff would have found a way to earn so much money when he comes back a wealthy man in the story's second half. That said, there's some justification in the way the original text continually refers to Heathcliff's black eyes and hair, as well as his "black" moods and temperament.
In the end, however, the trickiness of the casting is the least of the pic's problems. More challenging is its languorous repetitiveness, burdened as it is with too many (admittedly beautiful) sequences in the early going in which Heathcliff and Catherine frolic like lambs amid the heather, luxuriating in a quasi-incestuous but ultimately chaste intimacy. The most erotically charged moment between them comes when she licks the blood off his whipped back in a queasy-making sequence.(...)
She might have been more baffled, however, by Arnold's decision to tell the story entirely through Heathcliff's eyes, relieving the character of servant Nelly (Simone Jackson) of her narrator role. Meanwhile, the book's other narrator, Lockwood, is cut altogether, as is the seldom-adapted second half of the story, which follows the fortunes of Heathcliff and Catherine's own children. (Leslie Felperin)

Reports of the press conference:
The Guardian:

"The characters are defined by nature and by this very wild, rugged landscape where they live," said Arnold. "That's why the film feels animalistic at times. But when you get right down to it, we are all basically animals." (...)
Solomon Glave, another first-time actor, was less shy about showing his feelings, breaking down in tears at the press conference that followed the film. "This is a big, massive thing for me," enthused the teenager, who is winning plaudits for his turn as the younger Heathcliff. "I want to say thank you. Thank you to Andrea." (...)
"Every film is like a journey and this one was longer than most," Arnold admitted. "It's been a very difficult film in every way. At times it was almost like the film had a curse on it."
The Wuthering Heights press conference was briefly interrupted when the director's phone chose to ring her from her hand-bag. "That ringtone is the theme from The Life of Brian," Arnold explained, reaching down to switch it off. "That's the real me. Always looking on the bright side of life." Having just sat through more than two hours of blood, brooding and brutality, the journalists laughed in open disbelief. (Xan Brooks)

AFP:

"It's Gothic, feminist, socialist, sadomasochistic, Freudian, incestuous, violent and visceral. Trying to melt that into a film is an ambitious and perhaps foolish task," Arnold said about the famous novel, published in 1847. (...)
"I got very obsessed with Heathcliff and his childhood and how brutally he was treated. It's a theme in a lot of my films," she said, adding however, that she had been frustrated not to have had more time and space to bring him peace.
While Bronte follows Heathcliff until his death, the film does not attempt to tackle the later part of the novel, leaving Heathcliff grieving and lost out on the moors, his journey "incomplete".
"He's only complete when he's dead, when he's lying next to her in the ground, but we leave him wandering. (...)
"I really wanted to honour Bronte's essence," she said. "It's a dark and profound book almost beyond comprehension. I found out yesterday that it was not supposed to be read by anyone, sort of Bronte's private diary," she added.
Instead, the film becomes Heathcliff's private diary of passion and loss, lived out against a soundtrack of thundering rain, roaring winds and the lonely tapping of a solitary branch against the window of an empty room.
"Nature can be both beautiful and comforting but also brutal, selfish, furious and destructive. We are part of it, we are animals. Heathcliff is a force of nature," Arnold said.
"We are all of us animals. I think we might all be Heathcliff," she said. (Ella Ide)

The Telegraph:

“I never thought in a million years that I would ever do a period drama. I have never liked the idea of adaptations.
“But it was like I had no choice. Once the idea was in my head I could not put it down. Even when things became very difficult, I couldn’t let it go.
“When I re-read the book I found myself fretting about Heathcliff - the way he was treated as a boy, the brutality. I wanted to make it for him.” (Anita Singh)

Also: Associated Press, San Francisco IBTimes, Brandon Sun, Delta World...

Cineuropa interviews Andrea Arnold:

What was your aim in adapting a great classic of gothic literature? Did you wish to give your own interpretation of the novel?
Andrea Arnold: When I start a project, I don’t have a specific aim. A film is like a journey for me. I have a curiosity at the start and a desire to explore. As the journey is long, I learn a lot of things and they can be found in the film.
I let myself be guided by what happens. Of course, I wanted to respect the essence of the book, but this is my own understanding of the story and what it means for the characters. The novel is almost private; Emily Brontë wrote it for herself and not for a readership. I didn’t want to violate that intimacy, but rather create a new one.
The film has a particular approach to nature. Do you see the setting as a character in the film?
Nature is part of the film because living in such a wild area affects the characters, all their life. You can’t ignore it and that’s why I devote a large part of the film to it. (...)
Why did you cut out the whole of the second part of the novel?
The film would have lasted seven hours for the pure and simple reason that I like to pay attention to details. I thought that without the second part – which mainly revolves around the children – the film nonetheless told a complete story, that of Heathcliff.
Why did you keep the dialogues to a strict minimum?
Silence enables a heightening of feelings. This silence was very precious for the actors who were able to focus on their performance in a different, animal-like way. Body language is more important than words and I think this aspect is clear in the film. (Domenico LaPorta)