Wutheringly apoplectic

The Independent comments on Andrea Arnold's Heathcliff and thinks that we - as in Brontë fans - are 'apoplectic' about him:

A new American film of Wuthering Heights has cast as Heathcliff not brooding George Clooney nor rough-hewn Russell Crowe, nor any Laurence Olivier lookalike, but James Howson, an actor who is either fully black or mixed race. Emily Brontë aficionados are apoplectic. Blasphemous, they say, unthinkable, just the way many used to when a real black man played Othello instead of a white actor blacked up. England's traditions are apparently being violated. Stuff and nonsense. If they even skim-read the book, they would know Heathcliff was a strange boy, not white but of mysterious background, perhaps gypsy, or the mixed-race son of a foreign sailor and an Englishwoman. The way he is portrayed in part reflects his rejection.
Brontë also attributes his viciousness to his "otherness", and some critics have analysed racist expectations underpinning the character. So the choice is the most authentic yet of any screen version of the novel. Furthermore, there have been men of colour in this country since the 16th century – and some had white lovers, like Cathy. In the 18th century, this liaison would hardly have been surprising. The only shocking thing is that so many Englanders know nothing of their history and that it falls to outsiders to remind them. (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown)

The Australian, taking a look at the Venice Film Festival, doesn't seem too thrilled about the film:

Less successful was Andrea Arnold's take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, mainly because the director, presumably in an attempt to go for realism rather than romanticism, has cast largely unknown and untried actors with mixed success. (David Stratton)

The Sydney Morning Herald is also sceptical about using 'non-actors':

Performances of this calibre illustrate the potential weakness of using non-actors, as Andrea Arnold did in her otherwise convincingly grubby adaptation of Wuthering Heights, winner of the cinematography prize for Robbie Ryan. Her previous film, the much-awarded Fish Tank, paired Michael Fassbender as a knowing older man with the bus-stop discovery Katie Jarvis as an awkward teenager, which worked brilliantly. In her new film, Arnold evokes Emily Brontë's moors and the story's tragic trajectory persuasively, even movingly, but the performers simply don't have the skills to convey the consuming connection between Catherine and Heathcliff. (Stephanie Bunbury)

On the other hand, a few sites highlight Robbie Ryan's cinematography and his award for it at the Venice Film Festival. The Financial Times:

In a strong year for Britain, Robbie Ryan won and deserved the Best Cinematography prize for Wuthering Heights. His work here is stupendous: a weather-battered impasto, sluiced by lyricism, molten with changing colours, textured like a series of Turner canvases gone north. He should hang these images in a gallery and call them “Mud, rain, wind, passion”. (Nigel Andrews)

And so does The Seattle Times's Popcorn and Prejudice:

. . . it's still without a buyer as far as I know; as is "Wuthering Heights" (which won a well-deserved cinematography award at the Venice Film Festival, announced yesterday). (Moira Macdonald)

The Irish Times is proud of Robbie Ryan as well:

Robbie Ryan, one of Ireland’s most admired young directors of photography, received the best cinematography prize for his work on Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights . The film breaks new ground by casting a black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff. (Donald Clarke)

Meredith Brody from IndieWire's Thompson on Hollywood writes from Toronto:

I turn towards the Lightbox, but he laughs and turns me back towards Alexander Payne and George Clooney. But a few steps later I run into my friend David Pendleton, who thinks the reason, the only reason possible, that I’m headed away from the Lightbox is that Wuthering Heights is full, so I bow to the inevitable and turn towards Andrea Arnold and the moors.
I like Wuthering Heights – its old-fashioned Academy aperture frames those moors beautifully, the shots of nature (often red in tooth and claw) are rhythmic and poetic, the lives and dwelling places of both the poor and the rich are carefully delineated. But even while I understand what Arnold is trying to do, my Masterpiece Science Theater 3000 evil voice in my head comments on the action rather cynically.As soon as Arnold cast a black man as Heathcliff, she turned Wuthering Heights in the direction of Mandingo, especially after Heathcliff returns all grown up and receives hot-eyed glances from both Cathy and her sister-in-law Isabella. The constant shots of insects, animals, earth, mud, wind and rain – Heathcliff and Cathy all elemental, contrasted with Edgar, overdressed, indoors—reminded me, once again, that I am at two with nature. I decided that the 18th century’s television equivalent was looking into carefully-lit windows, framing bits of essential action. And that a popular pastime was hanging dogs on fenceposts by their collars. (It seemed that absolutely every animal seen in the film was harmed in some way, as attested to by the Inhuman Society.) And so on and so forth.

Metromix is also writing from Toronto:

British director Andrea Arnold's "Wuthering Heights" never settles for anything easy, though the typical audience for costume dramas may wish otherwise. A stripped-down, earthy, visually-driven adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic novel boasts beautiful cinematography only to bury its passion under layers of tedium.
We spend an awfully long time with Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) and Catherine (Shannon Beer) as children bonding in the harsh elements. They barely speak, but they sure do horse around in nature a lot, and the film quickly becomes repetitive and indulgent.
Arnold gives the material an additional twist by casting Heathcliff—an orphaned gypsy in Brontë's book—as a black man, adding overt racial tensions to the character's rivalry with Catherine's spiteful brother Hindley (Lee Shaw). But, at least initially, that basically means Hindley beats Heathcliff up a lot.
The plodding first half—made all the less compelling by the young actors' obvious inexperience—gives way to a comparably brisk and action-packed second half with older teens James Howson and the especially welcome Kaya Scodelario taking over as Heath and Cathy.
It's still slow going, but Arnold's vision finally begins to pay off in these later sections, mostly because there's finally some dialogue, active conflict and emotional directness to support the visual style. This reimagined "Heights" has similar intentions to this year's "grittier" "Jane Eyre," but "Eyre" provided a conventional narrative and acclaimed actors along with its handheld camerawork, gothic touches and period detail. "Heights" is bolder, and far surpasses "Eyre" in creating a tactile sense of time and place, but also serves to prove that in romantic classics, sometimes conventions serve a purpose. (Geoff Berkshire)

Hala Movie has also seen the film at the Toronto Film Festival:

Wuthering Heights is a grim, cruel novel, heralded for its daring technique and epic romance – love so suffocatingly intense that little could ever hope to compare. Healthcliff and Catherine's connection is the backbone to the darkness, but it has also been its downfall. Inspired by grandoise emotion, cinematic and episodic offerings have dulled the cruelty, smoothed the edges, and added a regal air to the proceedings, thrusting Emily Brontë's painful story into corsetted period garb that can't begin to adequately explore the source material. Andrea Arnold, on the other hand, removes the shine, revealing the novel's darkest aspects to tell a story of us versus them – unleashing the novel's pain, while also becoming too enamored with it. [...]
It's hard to adequately gauge Wuthering Heights. On the one hand, it's a wonderful diversion from the usual period pieces. Where others were enamored with the romance, Arnold is enamored with the pain and reality. This isn't a piece where the families live in truly grand houses with typical period garb, gorgeously pristine landscapes, and manipulative scores. She rips out every bit of the novel's dark reality and pushes it to the screen.
Most directly, she ends the habit of casting white actors as Heathcliff and instead casts two black unknowns (first Solomon Glave, then James Howson). Though it might be argued that he wasn't distinctly African, the casting is much more in line with the novel's description of a dark-skinned, black-eyed, black-haired gypsy than previous Heathcliffs like Tom Hardy or Ralph Fiennes. Heathcliff is the other in every shape of the word – he looks, speaks, and acts differently. As much as he might have been brought in because of Christian kindness, his otherness isn't something he can avoid.
Arnold also makes the Wuthering Heights farm modest, like the homes Emily Bronte is said to have been inspired by. The floors are dirty, the walls are crumbling, and it's the perfect, dingy backdrop to complement the downfall of Hindley. The floors creak and the wind continually howls while handheld cameras linger in the shadows. Arnold thrusts us into this world as much as she can while we sit in comfortable seats in a darkened theater. We feel every bit of the dreariness that encompasses the landscape and the Earnshaw family, and we can almost feel, smell, and taste the cold rain and fog as they descend. Images pop in and out of focus, the depth of field continually changes as is these are our eyes as we're led further into the world. As an audience, we aren't allowed to rest in our removed, sugared-over environment. We see this dankness and cold, we watch the players kill and prepare their meals, live in dirty clothes, and wrestle their boots from the mud. We're not allowed to ignore the dark corners of an already dark novel; we must watch the cruelty inflicted on the dogs, and experience the domination and violence. (Read more)

The Movie Hub very shows its dislike for the film while the Italian blog Il Cinema Bendato gives it a 6/10.

The Nation has a couple of paragraphs on the film and The Citizen also comments on some original aspects of it:

Robbie Ryan was awarded the prize for best photography for "Wuthering Heights" by Britain's Andrea Arnold, a dark adaptation of the tragic love story between Cathy and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's well-loved novel.
With no musical score, the film is a visual feast for the senses as it portrays the characters' turmoil through the lashing wind and rain, darkness and harshness of elements up on the Yorkshire moors in northern England. (Tiziana Fabi)

The Independent (Ireland) quotes the producers:

Film4, which backed both 'Shame' and 'Wuthering Heights', said the films were of "outstanding quality". (Neil Lancefield)

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights