Today there are more reviews of
Wuthering Heights 2011, of course. The Village Voice has two reviews. One is
The Self-Limited Vision of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights and as you can guess is not terribly positive:
Arnold and co-writer Olivia Hetreed's take on Heathcliff's story is confined to experiential detail, leaving viewers at arms length. (Brontë likewise denied her readers a sense of proximity to Heathcliff.) The camera floats around the periphery of his vision but almost never seamlessly approximates his perspective. Whenever we seem to be looking at events through his eyes, the back of Glave's head bobs into view, like a rude moviegoer who has arrived late to the show. That mud-and-Vaseline aesthetic smothers the film's capable cast. No individual performer stands out because Arnold's camera is effectively acting for and over them. (Simon Abrams)
It's only a few steps to the left, and devotees of the book will see the relevance right away. For more than 150 years, and through countless versions remolded for movie, radio, TV, and theater (including three operas, one composed by Bernard Herrmann and never performed during his lifetime), the young Heathcliff of the story's early passages has been defined as he was by Emily Brontë: a dirty, "dark," and swarthy lad; a "gipsy," culled from the slums of Liverpool (a port fraught with immigrants). But in all iterations, as the lad grew into manhood, he always became a mere Englishman distinguished only by his black hair and a cruel disposition. However much Brontë dripped suggestions into her narrator's minds about Heathcliff's possible mixed race, the role has always gone to white actors, from Laurence Olivier to Timothy Dalton to Tom Hardy, with nary a trace of swartness. (The one exception might be Luis Buñuel's 1954 film, in which everyone is Mexican.)
To be fair, we could read the mid-1800s English use of "dark" and "gypsy" as code for virtually anybody without discernibly proper British breeding. But it has been a vague and mysterious quality that Arnold has now made concrete and undeniable, doubling down on Brontë's ideas and steering the whole ship away from tragi-cosmic romance and toward whole-hog social tragedy, suffering the ghosts of slavery. This is intimated further by Arnold with a glimpse of the shirtless Heathcliff, his back scored with whip marks. In the 1770s, when the story is set, a black child was rare, even in Liverpool, the African chattel of the busy Brit-run slave trade going almost exclusively to British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas.
Which would make a black Heathcliff in Yorkshire an absolute stranger in a strange land, about whom specific bigoted norms would not even have been fully formed. Even so, his very presence in the manor houses of Brontë's imagination represents a primal taboo, a violent invasion of the First World by the Third. (Arnold's late-18th-century England feels quite Third as it is.) On top of that, talking about taboos, this is an interracial love story, in a time and place where, for most Brits, merely the chasm between the classes, not races, was more than enough to ruin lives and destroy families and disenfranchise entire swaths of the population. (Michael Atkinson)
Film.com reviews the movie too and gives it an A.
Though it is based on Emily Brontë’s novel, this is “Wuthering Heights” as you’ve never seen it before. Director Andrea Arnold has captured something rich and essential, seamlessly intertwined memory and time and created a beautiful, breathtaking sensual experience worthy of contemplation. [...]
For those who have never read the book, it will matter little as Arnold has taken care to develop an easily understood world and a felt story apart from the bleak novel. Arnold, along with cinematographer Robbie Ryan, is particularly gifted at evoking a strong and all-consuming sense of place, filling the screen with gorgeous, vibrant images and the sounds that go along with them, whistling winds, clanging pots and pans, every scene seems to evolve through the main striking images then the smaller details that memory grasps hold of, on down to the microscopic moments of color, texture and sound that must be experienced.
If it sounds exhausting or tiring, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the world of Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” is utterly absorbing, she has created something lasting and beautiful, the kind of film that is entirely engaging. We have the option every day of adding or subtracting from the world around us, and Arnold’s film, with a delicate hand and a sensitive touch, has added greatly, filling a void we did not know existed. (Amanda Mae Meyncke)
Another review on
Film.com mentions
Wuthering Heights, though not Andrea Arnold's particular take.
And by the end of the movie, their love as we know it has ended – because despite what “Wuthering Heights” and a million other books tell us, you can’t take love beyond the grave. “Amour” suggests, though, that when love is well-tended by the living, it can grow into something else, something even brighter and richer, after death – but that’s a mystery that we can’t possibly know until we get there ourselves. (Stephanie Zacharek)
Wuthering Heights 2011 is also one of
KPBS's 'cultural finds for October'.
In the rush to print anything explicit and cash in on the apparent sex craze aroused by E.L. James' phenomenally successful Fifty Shades of Grey, publishers have now done what to many is the unthinkable and sexually made-over the classic works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.
Described as "erotic rewrites", readers can indulge in Sherlock Holmes becoming steamy with Dr Watson in A Study in Scarlet, Pierre Aronnax being seduced by Ned Land in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, read about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy "aching" for it in Pride and Prejudice, while Mr Rochester tells his governess in Jane Eyre that she not only fills his body with desire, but he becomes rather more explicit when he kisses her. [...]
But there's also something tacky about using works of dead authors from the past to arouse reader interest in the present. It fails to honour the original work. It's literary necrophilia.
While I enjoy a good sex scene as much as the next person, I find the reworking or mash-up, as it's been called, of the classics to include graphic sex a violation.
It's neither sexy nor erotic.
It's just wrong. (Dr Karen Brooks)
We are sorry to disagree with Kiss frontman Gene Simmons when he says the following about his past as a teacher on
Parade:
On his teaching past. "I taught sixth grade in Spanish Harlem. I’m an immigrant and I wanted to give back to America, which gave me everything. I had these delusions of grandeur of being this great emancipator of free thought and education. I really wanted to expand young people’s minds because everything begins with a great idea. But then of course, you enter the corporate world, and I was not allowed to bring in Spider-Man comics and teach the kids that you can be a pimple-faced teenager that the cops don’t like and the bad guys don’t like, but you can still become Spider-Man, which to me is more inspirational than teaching a Puerto Rican kid in Spanish Harlem about Jane Eyre, a rosy-checked white girl in England. That didn’t connect.”
We don't know about other classics, but we are pretty sure that Jane Eyre could be a highly inspirational story in that context.
And speaking of teaching,
Mendoza online (Argentina) (in Spanish) has an article on governesses.
Cuando pensamos en una institutriz inmediatamente evocamos a las sufridas figuras de irregular destino de Jane Eyre o de Agnes Grey, célebres personajes creados por Charlotte y Anne Brontë respectivamente; recordamos a las simpáticas y afinadas Mary Poppins y María Augusta von Trapp de La novicia rebelde y padecemos junto a Becky Sharp, la protagonista de La feria de las vanidades de William Makepeace Thackeray.
Ellas reflejan a gran número de mujeres de su época, quienes eran maestras y brindaban educación a domicilio, alternando los rudimentos de la educación con el cuidado de los niños en el hogar familiar. (Patricia Rodón) (Translation)
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