With the release date of Oscar-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” adaptation growing nearer, it should be a great time for Emily Brontë fans. But instead, every new piece of intel about the film, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff, leaves serious bibliophiles feeling left out in the cold.
The rift began with the “Promising Young Woman” director’s choice of Robbie and Elordi as her leads, which was unpopular with fans of Brontë’s 1847 novel about sadomasochistic obsession from the word go. Beyond the obvious physical incongruences between the actors and Brontë’s characters — including discrepancies around age, hair color, and skin color — there’s been heavy speculation about whether the dazzling Australian stars would capture the essence of their morally decrepit literary equivalents, whose affection for each other literally ruins lives.
After all, “I, Tonya” is arguably the most crazed Robbie has ever been on screen, and Elordi’s charm, despite his best efforts, always seems to shine through his performances, even while playing abusive men in “Euphoria” and “Priscilla” and a literal monster in the new “Frankenstein.”
Until now, the team behind the new “Wuthering Heights” hasn’t been especially reassuring in the face of those critiques. During an appearance in April at the Sands Film Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, the film’s casting director invoked the merits of “racially blind casting” and encouraged people to give the film a chance. But she also said, “There’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy.”
“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot. But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art,” she said, teasing that the set design was “even more shocking” than the choice of leads and that “there may or may not be a dog collar in it.”
And this week, Robbie and Fennell upped the ante, weighing in with what may be the most discouraging news yet for hardcore devotees of Brontë’s Gothic text. During a conversation with British Vogue that was published on Thursday, the director and actor — whose company, LuckyChap, produced Fennell’s debut and her second feature, “Saltburn” — explained that their vision for the film was an epic love story in the vein of Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” and other highly watchable Hollywood romances.
“In one of our first conversations about this film, I asked Emerald what her dream outcome was. She said, ‘I want this to be this generation’s “Titanic.” I went to the cinema to watch “Romeo & Juliet” eight times and I was on the ground crying when I wasn’t allowed to go back for a ninth. I want it to be that,’” Robbie said, adding that she thinks the film, which releases on Valentine’s Day next year, is “going to be an amazing date movie.”
The actor added that she and Fennell spent a lot of time discussing the film’s intimate scenes, which are teased in the bouncy trailer, and that, again, their focus was on making a film befitting a romantic evening or a girls’ night out.
“Everyone’s expecting this to be very, very raunchy. I think people will be surprised. Not to say there aren’t sexual elements and that it’s not provocative — it definitely is provocative — but it’s more romantic than provocative,” Robbie said. “This is a big epic romance. It’s just been so long since we’ve had one — maybe ‘The Notebook,’ also ‘The English Patient.’ You have to go back decades.”
While Fennell was apparently a fan of “Wuthering Heights” from a young age — telling the magazine that her inspiration for the adaptation came from seeing Elordi on the set of “Saltburn,” wearing sideburns reminiscent of the Heathcliff on her teenage copy — Robbie had never read the book or watched previous film versions before getting involved in the project. She was just wooed by Fennell’s script and its take on Cathy, which worked out well for the director who was looking for a heavy dose of likability in her female lead.
“Cathy is a star,” the director said in the interview. “She’s willful, mean, a recreational sadist, a provocateur. She engages in cruelty in a way that is disturbing and fascinating. It was about finding someone who you would forgive in spite of yourself, someone who literally everyone in the world would understand why you love her. It’s difficult to find that supersized star power. Margot comes with big dick energy. That’s what Cathy needs.”
Together, Fennell and Robbie’s comments pretty much validate what a certain group of moviegoers have feared: that the new film version of “Wuthering Heights” has much less in common with the original text and more with a highly stylized, star-studded blockbuster romance — and that was always going to be the case.
That doesn’t mean that the director and star own anyone an apology, or that they don’t have the right to deviate as much as they want from the book. It’s not as if the previous film versions have been exactly faithful — with many of them, going back to the 1939 rendition starring Laurence Olivier, even cutting out half the plot. And Hollywood adaptations of novels take liberties as a rule, as evidenced by Guillermo del Toro’s portrayal of “Frankenstein,” which includes new characters and major plot points, along with a somehow alluring Elordi in the lead role.
But it is worth saying that there’s a definite ideological divide between the Hollywood powerhouses and the dedicated fanbase of Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” Anyone who has read the novel knows that “Wuthering Heights” is not a romance: It’s a warning. And marketing that as “the greatest love story of all time,” as the film’s promotional materials have, doesn’t do justice to its author’s brilliance — with all due respect to Nicholas Sparks.