Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights. Second day

Second round of British reviews of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights (picture: Simone Jackson who plays Nelly Dean):

Positive

Sheffield Telegraph:

It is intense and edgy, with hand-held camerawork giving it an immediacy, and employs the language of the streets, and yet it captures the essence of Emily Brontë’s novel. (..)
With close-ups of wildlife and a non-musical soundtrack of sounds Arnold points up the sense of isolation and closeness to nature to bring a visceral quality to the story.

Contact Music:

Unlike most period adaptations, this film is more about the dark emotions than sets and costumes. Arnold continually cuts to telling details -little annoyances, dark memories, confusing emotions - all of which get us deeply under the characters' skin. The whole film exists in the moment, so we sometimes have to guess what's happening in the plot. But this also makes it feel urgent and intensely intimate, capturing the mystery and grim beauty of Brontë's novel in a way we never thought we'd see on screen.

Time Out London:

The film’s interest in dirt and dust, blood and bogs, brings to mind the earthiness of Andrew Kötting’s Émile Zola adaptation, ‘This Filthy Earth’, although the intimate shots of nature recall Terrence Malick. There’s a touch of the Ken Loach of ‘Days of Hope’ or Bill Douglas of ‘Comrades’ in its unfussy, non-decorous approach to period – although, unlike them, Arnold prefers little talk. (...)

This silence and the intimate cosying-up to Heathcliff becomes a slight problem in the film’s later stages. Here, older Heathcliff and Cathy are not as interesting as their younger selves – and nor are the actors playing them. Howson looks lost and Scodelario is a thin presence. The film’s later chapters feel too much like standard melodrama with the sound off – and by this stage, cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s exquisite imagery becomes a touch repetitive too.
But the best of the film – the first hour – is excellent. Arnold’s strongest work goes into exploring Heathcliff and Cathy’s tentative romance with tenderness and a visceral sense of where pain meets pleasure. Glave and Beer work well together. A scene of them fighting in the mud contains all the longing necessary to explain the distress of their later parting. Arnold is great at exploring Heathcliff’s isolation, showing us only what he sees as he lurks round corners or peers through doors.
The film’s lack of final tragedy is a difficulty. By the end, you feel as shut off from this world as Heathcliff, a stranger in his own story. It’s a smart approach – but not fully satisfying to share. Still, Arnold’s film looks astounding and there are clever choices in every scene.  (Dave Calhoun)

Mark Kermode gives a positive review on BBC's Film24.


Mostly Positive:
Sight & Sound:

Yet Andrea Arnold’s stark, defiantly naturalistic new version succeeds brilliantly in injecting the shock of the new into this well-thumbed English classic.
Her rough, elemental reading of Wuthering Heights, replete with casual brutality, Ted Hughes-like scrutiny of wildlife both dead and alive and Heathcliff’s sullen cries of “Fook off”, will jolt audiences weaned on the romantic tropes of previous versions just as Brontë’s uncouth beast of a book did its Victorian readers. Stripping away the literary, romantic and supernatural trappings, Arnold has substituted her signature social realism, gutting the gothic framework of the novel and recasting the story from Heathcliff’s point of view from his arrival as an Afro-Caribbean runaway slave rescued in Liverpool and brought to a bleak Yorkshire hill farm. The only things embraced wholeheartedly from her source beyond its dark central obsession are the harsh yet beautiful landscape and the relentlessly raw weather, which pass beyond ‘pathetic fallacy’ status thanks to Nicolas Becker’s birdsong-flecked, wind-whipped sound design to become almost characters in their own right. (...)
Wuthering Heights privileges its austere and gorgeous images heavily over speech, as part of the film’s rejection of the literary template of most adaptations. While this suits the feral intensity of the childhood half of the narrative, it deprives us of the fierce gusts of confession that animate the novel, and contributes to a certain heavyhandedness in the lovers’ reunion here. (...)
Nothing in the dawdling, overwrought second half can match the sensuous immersion of the childhood scenes, and frequent flashbacks to that rough-and-tumble idyll only highlight this disparity in emotional force. Just at the point when Wuthering Heights should be wringing your heart, you find it’s merely wringing its hands instead. (Kate Stables)

Negative
The Mirror:

This one ricochets back into the realm of unwatchable. (...) It’s not a costume drama in any real sense, with blusters of wind standing in for dialogue and, frankly, sheer boredom subbing for Brontë’s look into the riddles of the human heart. (David Edwards)

What's on TV:

And with no chemistry between his Heathcliff and Kaya Scodelario’s Cathy (played more successfully as children by Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave), their all-consuming, obsessive love fails to come alive. Full praise to Arnold for ridding her adaptation of all trace of heritage-film gentility and decorum, such a shame she jettisoned the book’s passion and poetry too. (Jason Best)

And Never Knowingly Underwhelmed. 

A concise summary of reviews can be read in The Week or The Daily.

Paterson Joseph celebrates Andrea Arnold's choice of a black Heathcliff in The Guardian:

I've not read Wuthering Heights and for some reason, possibly the terrible sadness of its storyline, I've tried to avoid filmed versions of it too. But Andrea Arnold's retelling of Emily Brontë's story has me intrigued. Casting a black Heathcliff seems to have divided critics down the middle: some say it is an accurate and justifiable reading of the story of the "dark outsider"; others dismiss it as a bit of modern, multicultural nonsense.
Indeed, one critic wrote that far from Arnold's description of the actor James Howson as a "young Jimi Hendrix", they found him more like "a young Rio Ferdinand". A British film director decides to cast the best actor she can find regardless of colour, and the critic chooses to mock her choice by comparing the artist to a footballer with the same colour skin. Boring, predictable and sad. (...)
As an actor, I want to be in works that reflect black presence in the UK throughout the nation's history.
But if I am to do that, then playwrights must get researching to broaden their palate, and programme makers must look away from their mirrors and see the darker shades around both them and their ancestors. In the meantime, I applaud Arnold's intelligence and openness in casting who she liked, regardless of their ethnicity.

Mumford & Sons have uploaded to YouTube part of  their song The Enemy, which is played during the end credits of the film.

The Daily Mail carries an article about the fascination with the Brontës, centered on the upcoming auction of a Charlotte Brontë juvenilia manuscript.The tone is a bit tabloid-y (Emily Brontë was obsessed with incest? Rev. Carus Wilson beat Charlotte mercilessly?) but could be a lot worse (and better... as Haworth is misspelled again). Here are just a few quotes:

The document is tiny. Its 19 pages are the size of your credit card. Its author was 14 years old. And it is expected to reach in the region of £300,000 when it goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s auction house on December 15.
For this is a lost story by none other than Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, and a member of the famous family who lived in the parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
Our fascination with the Bronte sisters is seemingly inexhaustible. This autumn alone, there have been new films of Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Director Andrea Arnold’s brooding, silent Wuthering Heights is the 27th film adaptation of this book. (...)
The extraordinary gifts of the Brontës spring from the hidden well of genius. But genius has to be planted in a nourishing soil.
And the strangeness of this tragedy-struck family, the ‘unhealthy’ fantasies they indulged, combined with Patrick Brontë’s determination to instil in them an intellectual seriousness and a pursuit of learning, enabled the genius to flourish.
The discovery of the little short story by Charlotte Brontë will excite the booksellers and the speculators, and be of great interest to scholars. But in the end it is the human element of this document which brings us out in goose-flesh.
Like the clothes she left behind, the tiny nature of this document brings her, for some reason, vividly to life again.
Seeing the miniature pages, we are once again in the enclosed, claustrophobic atmosphere of that parsonage, in the depths of winter, with the wind howling outside on the Yorkshire moors, and a group of children, hyperactive and flushed with tubercular blushes, exclaiming their fantastical tales, as, in the room over the corridor, their short-sighted and miserable father mourns his wife, hunched over his Greek Bible. (An Wilson)

The Hollywood Reporter thinks that probably Jane Eyre 2011 would have benefited from being at some Film Festival:

Three well-received independents -- Chris Weitz's A Better Life, Cary Joji Fukunaga's Jane Eyre and Gavin O'Connor's Warrior -- braved the marketplace without the benefit of festival exposure that, in retrospect, might have proved beneficial. Some claim that critics' influence is decreasing, but this sort of in-betweener film needs all the help it can get -- so in this realm, I believe we remain vitally important. (Todd McCarthy)

indieWire makes some predictions for the Oscars and Jane Eyre 2011: possible (but not probable) nominations in Best Art Direction and Best Original Score and probable nomination in Costume Design.

Brigitte.de announces a preview of the film in Germany for next November 28 (the film opens in Germany on December 1). You can check on the website how to attend.

Being a nerd and a Brontëite in The Colorado Daily:

While the other kids at school were busy reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and then pretending to be fairies and hobbits during recess, crashing into each other, screaming, "Where's mah precioussssss?!" I was trying to get them to be characters from Emily Brontë and Jane Austen books. (It was a pretty nerdy school in California and I was the Nerd Queen.) (Jeanine Fritz)

The Montreal Gazette reviews the Lakeshore Players production of Jane Eyre in Quebec:

The challenge, sad to say, was quite beyond the capabilities of director Kevin John Saylor and his mostly amateur cast. It made for a long evening, dreams of escape, and a chance to marvel at the attentiveness of this company’s large and loyal audience. (...) 
The Lakeshore Players, having bitten off more than they could possibley chew with Jane Eyre, relied on a director who appears to have been at a  loss as to what to do with them, or the play. (...)
But the choral narration did not work well, the set was haphazard, and weak projection coupled with awful acoustics made me wonder how much of the text was actually getting across to those who were hard of hearing. (Pat Donnelly)

The Saturday Monitor (Uganda) interviews the writer Rogers Atukunda:

Which novels would you read if you were stuck on an island?
Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Abrahams presents the plea of the Africans and the dehumanising impact of a fascist apartheid regime in South Africa. Bronte is different in approach, she merges the gap between the powerful and the insignificant. (Beatrice Lamwaka)

The Wall Street Journal asks Anne Enright about her best five books. She doesn't say any Brontë but says:

There are so many classic tales on the "torn between two lovers" theme: "Wuthering Heights," "Gone With the Wind," "Doctor Zhivago," "The Age of Innocence," "Love in the Time of Cholera." My favorite, however, somehow takes the opposite of that theme: "The Wings of the Dove"[.]

The Independent (Ireland) interviews Adam Matthews from the band Late Fragments:

Your other YouTube 'hit' is a version of Wuthering Heights. Kate Bush fans can be fanatical -- but everyone seems to love your take on the song.
It's actually more a cover of a cover. It was based on Albert Niland's version. I don't think he was happy about us doing it. From what I've heard, it brought more attention to him having done it. And he's been trying to get away from it for 10 years. (Ed Power)

The Australian quotes Charlotte Brontë:

The great circularity of life, perhaps, often acutely connected to landscape. "We wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air," Charlotte Brontë wrote, and how beguiling that sounds, how understandable the want to recapture the sheer happiness of childhood; the very air of it, shift of its seasons, light. (Nikki Gemmell)

Associated Content publishes a review of Claire Boylan's Emma Brown; jill_m_casey uploads to Flickr pictures of Fritz Eichenberg's engravings for Wuthering Heights; a gallimaufry has reread Jane Eyre; Books: A True Story posts about Wuthering Heights;  Abigails Ateliers gives advice to visitors to Haworth and recommends this weekend's Scroggling The Holly event; Rubens Ewald Filho (in Portuguese), La Stamberga dei Lettori (in Italian) review Jane Eyre 2011.