Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation is very, very badly cast, and here’s why.

I think everyone is on the same page—which is to say, angry. The internet is angry, my friends are angry, and I am angry, and here’s why (though if you are reading this website, you probably already know this news): Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn , is adapting Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights , and it has been announced that the two impassioned, absolutely unhinged leads Cathy and Heathcliff will be played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Yes! Yes. Obviously, there’s there’s a lot to unpack here! First of all, Margot Robbie is a very good actress, but I personally don’t buy her as the very young, self-directed, ghostly-tortured Cathy. We need a young, pale little freak to play Cathy. End of story. Second of all, Fennell does not seem to be the right director for this project. Now, the few dissenters might say, “but what do you mean? Fennell is the least subtle filmmaker out there, and Wuthering Heights is the least subtle book out there, so shouldn’t it be a good match?” No! The answer is no! The lack of subtlety in Wuthering Heights is highly calibrated and effective; it acts as an enveloping thematic device to corral the wild, almost fauvistic, and borderline psychopathic urges of its characters with the abstractness of their yearning and connection, and the ethereality of their later existences. Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of stark contrasts and impulsive movements. Contrarily, as evidenced by her last two films, Fennell’s directorial hand forgoes subtlety without swapping it for any richer devices to augment the reading. Her films are sparse in subtext and therefore in their interpretive potential; she seems to point directly to things not to map out a complicated web of behaviors or feelings, but to explain things to an audience she seems to fear will not understand what she is trying to say. This makes various elements in both of these films both highly redundant and reductive. Thirdly, and many on Twitter have said this, including Joyce Carol Oates, but Robbie and Elordi don’t promise […]

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