Re-Visiting Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Filmed Adaptation of Wuthering Heights: A Conversation About Adaptations

Emily Brontë’s sole published work, Wuthering Heights, is not a beautiful story. It’s barely even a love story, much less “the greatest love story of all time” as the tagline for Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation goes. Brontë wrote this story to showcase the brutal ugliness of humanity by exploring the devastating fallout of generational abuse, racism, and classism. As Peter Bradshaw writes for The Guardian: “Director Andrea Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan strip the story ruthlessly down to its bare essentials: pain, anger and love.” 

Arnold’s greatest strength in this film is her decided lack of romance. The Earnshaw family home is not a picturesque country house, but a grimy farmhouse smack dab in the middle of nowhere, bombarded by brutal rainstorms. According to Jeannette Catsoulis for NPR: “Captured with ravishing naturalism–from eye-straining candlelight to painfully harsh daylight…the film has a melancholy, sinister atmosphere only partly explained by its lashings of rain and banks of gray fog.” Catherine (Shannon Beer as an adolescent, and Kaya Scodelario as a young adult) and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave as an adolescent, later James Howson as a young adult) do not go on Bridgerton-style promenades across a flowery, green landscape, but hike their way through harsh, windy, grassy terrains that leave them caked in dirt. 

Arnold’s aesthetic may not be the most conventionally attractive, but it shows a clear understanding of the text’s Gothic nature and immerses the viewer in the world that Brontë herself was drawing from. The Earnshaws themselves are portrayed as rough, middle-class farmers, especially in comparison to the wealthy, upper-class Lintons. There is meant to be a clear class divide between Wuthering Heights and the neighboring estate of Thrushcross Grange, as shown in scenes of Catherine and Heathcliff sneaking across the moors to peek into the Lintons’ windows. Where the Lintons are well-dressed, educated, and sophisticated, the Earnshaws must work in fields and can only afford to send one person–Hindley (Lee Shaw)--to university. 

Another highlight of Arnold’s film is the attention paid to Catherine and Heathcliff’s shared childhood. When Heathcliff is first brought to the Earnshaws, he is around six or seven years old, while Catherine is five and Hindley is fourteen. Their connection is one that is innocent of the societal divides that await them in adulthood. It may surprise newcomers to know that Catherine’s narrative action is confined to the first half of the novel until her death halfway through. Consequently, Kaya Scodelario is not given as much screen time as audiences may have expected from such a well-established actor. However, part of Wuthering Heights’ tragedy comes from the juvenile naivete of its characters. By the time Edgar Linton (Jonny Powell when younger and James Northcote when older) proposes to Catherine, she is fifteen while he is only a few years older (but likely still a teenager). Catherine’s life is cut tragically short before she ever truly gets a chance to grow up. 

Of course, the most standout choice that Arnold makes in her film is the decision to cast Black actors in the role of Heathcliff. Despite Heathcliff’s explicit description as “dark-skinned” along with numerous assumptions about his race which strongly imply that he was not white, almost every adaptation before the 2011 version–and including the upcoming movie–has cast a white actor in the role. Racism in Wuthering Heights was not an afterthought, but a prominent part of the story, especially where Heathcliff was concerned. Characters such as Nelly Dean and even Catherine herself constantly refer to his darker complexion and features, while Hindley calls him Romani slurs. Bradshaw writes that this casting choice leads to Heathcliff being “confronted with overt and brutal racism from those of his new family who resent the outsider, and are determined to treat him like any farm animal.” Heathcliff’s race is part of the overall theme of “othering” that is present throughout the story; he is not like these white people, and he is mistreated because of it.  

A major criticism of Fennell’s film is her decision to cast Australian actor Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff. This backlash was further fueled by her casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, defending the choice, remarking that “you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life”.  However, this book is meant to reflect real life, and that includes England–and Yorkshire’s–complicated history of racial prejudice that is a catalyst for the abuse that Heathcliff suffers as a child. Frankly, it is frustrating how many filmmakers have chosen to simply ignore the explicit references to Heathcliff being non-white, considering that it is made very clear in the text. There are only so many times a filmmaker can say it’s an “interpretation” when one of the first things readers learn about Heathcliff is that he is “dark-skinned.” 

Unfortunately, for all the things that Arnold gets right in her adaptation, there are several areas in which she falls short. As Roger Ebert points out in his November 2012 review: “What she hasn’t done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel’s passages, particularly from the later chapters, it’s dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted.” Like many past iterations, Arnold cuts out the narrative framing device of Nelly Dean telling the story to Mr. Lockwood, along with the second half of the story, which follows the children of Catherine and Edgar and Heathcliff and Isabella. Additionally, dialogue is incredibly sparse in this film, which quickly wears out as the film goes on, which creates confusion rather than intrigue. 

Arnold’s film is far from perfect, and to an extent, it is unfair to pass harsh judgment on Fennell’s film before it comes out. However, if future filmmakers wish to adapt the challenging Gothic text, they should look to Arnold’s gritty, naturalistic version for a blueprint. Frankly, a movie that bluntly showcases the wildness of the moorlands and the intense connection between Catherine and Heathcliff is what Brontë herself would have wanted.