Garish and silly ‘Wuthering Heights’ strands Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi on the moors forevermore

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Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in ‘Wuthering Heights.’Supplied

“Wuthering Heights”

Directed by Emerald Fennell, based on the novel by Emily Brontë

Starring Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi and Hong Chau

Classification 14A; 136 minutes

Opens in theatres Feb. 13

Late last week, representatives for Warner Bros. sent out a curious directive to film critics set to review Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Namely, that we don’t refer to the film as Wuthering Heights but rather “Wuthering Heights” – in quotation marks.

Presumably, the scare quotes are there to convey that this is not a straight-ahead adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, but rather a wildly off-piste journey into the Yorkshire moors that is so distantly removed from its source material that it requires a postmodern sense of play. Or something like that. Listen, I’m not in the habit of bowing down to studio orders when it comes to my editorial copy, but in this case I’ll oblige, given that Fennell’s film is as silly and annoying as its studio’s typographical demand. So, “Wuthering Heights” it is.

While we’re at it, here are some other elements of the film that deserve the quote-unquote treatment: its “direction,” “casting,” “visuals,” and “story.” Let’s start with that last thing, given that Fennell seems as interested in Brontë‘s original work as she is in developing narratively and thematically coherent endings (see the finales of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn for more on this, if you must). Cleaving off the second half of the original story – where the author’s themes of inherited cruelty and the costs of redemption come to the fore – this new “Wuthering” focuses solely on the tumultuous relationship between two of Western literature’s most intentionally despicable characters: Catherine (Margot Robbie), the daughter of the 1800s farming and land baron who has fallen on hard times, and the dirt-poor Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), who grew up alongside Catherine as a sort of adopted brother after he was abandoned by his wastrel father.

I’m no stickler for literary fidelity, and for any film to match or surpass its source material, a filmmaker has to make their own bold choices. Yet Fennell seems to possess a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of story, whether it’s Brontë‘s or her “own,” she is exactly trying to tell here. The film’s first half, in which Elordi and Robbie circle each other as if they are both about to melt, all the while observed by the prim and proper servant Nelly (Hong Chau), plays like a bodice-ripping farce. In my screening, nervous chuckles greeted scenes in which Heathcliff stuffs Catherine’s mouth with clumps of grass, or when the pair secretly witness a kinky scene of sexual horseplay between their servants. It’s all too silly to arouse, but too garish and annoying to be thoughtful. It feels as if Fennell is torn between having her cake and eating it out, too.

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Margot Robbie in ‘Wuthering Heights.’Supplied

But I would take faux titillation over what goes on in the film’s second half, which asks its audience to fall head over heels for a lush tragedy between two remarkable monsters. Unsure how to reckon with Heathcliff’s vengeful side – after being spurned by the selfish Catherine for a wealthy neighbor named Edgar (Shazad Latif), the film’s ostensible hero takes Edgar’s naïve sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) as his tormented bride – Fennell dives headfirst into a noxious and shallow swamp of doomed-romance swooning. The resulting affair ensures that moviegoers will have a slam-dunk class-action suit against Fennell for causing bodily harm: you’ll roll your eyes so hard that you’ll injure your head.

Speaking of eyes, Fennell has clearly prioritized popping them, the director embracing a kind of aesthetic maximalism that she initially toyed with in Saltburn. Every costume is lavish, every set so extravagantly, almost deliciously designed as if to prompt the more famished of audiences to ask whether they can take a bite. Or maybe just a lick.

But no amount of meticulously composed shots trained on aspic-entombed prawns or freakishly large glazed strawberries – which Catherine nibbles on as if instructed by Humbert Humbert – can distract from the gaping holes in absolutely everything else on the screen, including its frequently drenched (in rain, among other liquids) stars.

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Jacob Elordi in ‘Wuthering Heights.’Supplied

While Elordi, who is reuniting with Fennell after his turn playing another abused boy-toy in Saltburn, admirably bobs and weaves in his bid to balance Heathcliff’s darkness with a more soulful kind of yearning for things that he simply cannot have, Robbie is fabulously miscast as Catherine. Especially in the film’s first half, in which the actress (now 35) is asked to play a teenage, at best twentysomething, naïf. Perhaps Fennell is trying to channel the absurd comedic magic of the 1994 cult film Clifford, in which the fortysomething Martin Short plays a hyperactive 10-year-old boy. Lord Byron knows that I would’ve rather watched that remake.

Then there is Fennell’s decision to cast Elordi at all, given that Heathcliff was described by Brontë as a “dark-skinned gypsy” and long viewed as ethnically vague, the “other” who so entrances the white, once-blue-blooded Catherine. Fennell’s decision to cast the unambiguously white Elordi might not be so objectionable – again, every new interpreter of a story should be given the grace to reimagine and recontextualize the boundaries of a world previously conceived – were it not for just how the director chooses to cast the rest of her film. If we can ask why this version of Heathcliff is embodied in a certain way (white and untouchably virile) then we can also ask Fennell to explain her decision to hire an actor of colour to play the weak-willed and metaphorically impotent Edgar, who was very much white in Brontë’s story.

All of this, though, would require audiences to seriously consider the undertaking that is “Wuthering Heights,” which repeatedly proves to have been constructed absent any sense of seriousness. I suppose it is all up there in the film’s opening scene, set at a public execution, in which Fennell constructs a gallows-humour gag whose mileage depends on your appreciation for the appropriate usage of the words “hang” and “hung.” But that joke, like the rest of this adaptation, is ultimately on the audience. Or, rather, “the audience.”