★★½ (2½ out of 4)
The bitching started days before Emerald Fennell’s version of Emily Brontë’s Gothic romance even opened. Margot Robbie, 35, was deemed too old to play Catherine as a teen and Jacob Eloridi too whitewashed to ever suggest the dark-skinned gypsy in Heathcliff’s soul.
The upshot is you can’t please everybody. I found Robbie and Elordi sufficiently gorgeous to make any miscasting concerns negligible. But there’s something intangible absent amid the whirling, wicked pleasures of this “Wuthering Heights.” Keep an eye out for it.
As an admirer of Fennell’s first two go-for-broke features, “Promising Young Woman” (Oscar for best original screenplay) and “Saltburn” (infamous for Elordi’s bathwater scene), I only wish she’d pushed more profane envelopes and touched more raw spots under the skin in her indisputably steamy take on Brontë’s first and only novel published in 1847.
No matter. If you want to take your valentine through a tunnel of forbidden movie love, “Wuthering Heights” is your ticket to heaven as it sweeps you up on waves of hotness, heartbreak and ravishing romance. Fennell makes sure there’s something for everyone, sprinkling her soundtrack with Charli xcx dance pop, plus latex/leather and BDSM costume fetishism that Brontë herself never investigated. I’m assuming Fennell’s opening shot of a hanged man still sporting a visible erection is a symbol of undying love. Or something like that.
A hot and heavy Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi suck each other’s faces with a wild, porny abandon that would have Victorians of the day fainting dead away. No complaints here.
Fennell reduces the number of characters in the novel to focus hard on Cathy and Heathcliff. We meet them first as brats on the moors of West Yorkshire, England, where young, spoiled Catherine (Charlotte Mellington) is revolted by the dark, dirty orphan her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), has brought home. She names him Heathcliff after her dead brother. He’s very well played by “Adolescence” star Owen Cooper, the youngest boy Emmy winner ever, with a bristling danger that gets Heathcliff beaten by his alleged betters, a torture that both shocks Cathy and turns her on—a very teen thing that sits awkwardly on Robbie’s maturity.
Fennell has said she directed this “Wuthering Heights” to capture what she felt when she first read the novel as a 14-year-old. And that’s exactly the feeling that comes across as the pair morph into Robbie and Elordi and still treat each other like hormonal teens— she leading him on and then rejecting him and he seething with resentment even as he acts the submissive, licking her filthy fingers. Note to oral obsessives: there is more tongue action to come.
The plot thickens, truly, when Cathy—to taunt Heathcliff—flirts with wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), who she ends up marrying with encouragement from her paid companion Nelly (a finely nuanced Hong Chau). Make what you will of persons of color being given supporting roles, but in a scene-stealing contest Hong Chau is hard to beat.
The Edgar thing sends Heathcliff on the run for five years only to return with a glam makeover, limitless money and a new way to stick it to Cathy by marrying Edgar’s sister Isabella, a minor part given major definition and bizarro dazzle by Alison Oliver.
The tragic ending, in view from the start, gives the hot-and-heavy Robbie and Elordi the chance to suck each other’s faces with a wild, porny abandon that would have Victorians fainting dead away. No complains here, though there is something to be said for the heat of sexual repression in William Wyler’s dated 1939 film version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.
But Fennell, a true believer in show over tell, cannot be faulted for singeing the screen with the carnal fireworks sparked by Elordi’s brooding heat and Robbie’s flushed beauty. Even Cathy’s bloodless hubby Edgar has their bedroom wallpapered in pink hued, blue-veined, flesh tones to match his beloved’s skin. Too much? You bet, but that’s Fennell’s default position as she has “La La Land” camera wiz Linus Sandgren shoot her stars like the prime physical specimens they are.
Posters from the movie, like the one above, show Elordi and Robbie posed like Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in “Gone with the Wind.” Both are fully clothed when Gable’s Rhett Butler tells Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara: “You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.” Audiences still swoon over that scene. Sadly, nothing in Fennell’s graphic, R-rated “Wuthering Heights” can match it. Robbie and Elordi have the looks, the talent and lord knows the spirit, but timeless screen chemistry can’t be manufactured. When you leave the candy box of visual delights in “Wuthering Heights” and wonder what’s missing, that’s it. See if you don’t agree.