Archive for January 2009
ITV’s Wuthering Heights (2009)
Every time a new film or television adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is announced, it seems that at least one writer espouses the opinion that maybe, just maybe, Wuthering Heights is one of those novels that will never be able to be adapted successfully at all. The narrative frame is too complicated — the characters are too morally deficient — the passions are too wild and the revenge is too off-putting. It just won’t translate to the screen, big or small.
Even if I’m not convinced that the novel is un-adaptable, I have to admit that most film adaptations of the novel have fallen pretty short of the mark. And while I had high hopes for the new ITV adaptation — aired here in America on Masterpiece Classic on PBS — I was, sadly, pretty disappointed again.
The one thing this adaptation had going for it was atmosphere. I felt like it managed to convey the tension and discontent that leaps off the pages of the novel. Everyone was appropriately frustrated, and all of the “happy” moments were appropriately balanced right on the edge of the knife, ready to tip over into anguish and despair at any given second. That was good — that felt like the novel I experienced as a reader.
The acting as a whole was also well done. I felt Charlotte Riley missed the mark when it came to capturing Cathy’s petulant and grasping madness, but Tom Hardy was unusual and sometimes haunting as Heathcliff. Hardy’s acting was best for me in the scenes immediately after his sudden reappearance; he really captured the boastful, almost funny facade that Heathcliff puts on to cover the resentment and anger at Cathy, Edgar, and Hindley that still simmers and bubbles underneath. I thought Andrew Lincoln was one of the brightest spots in the adaptation. He managed to turn Edgar, who is so often simpering, passive, effeminate, and bland, into a more human character. Rather than merely a foil for Heathcliff, Lincoln’s Edgar was a frustrated man in his own right, trying to do his best within the societal constraints that he so clearly subscribes to. Overall, though, these are weak versions of the characters presented by the novel — there’s no dog-hanging, no baby-dangling, no wrists against broken windows, and no head-versus-couch trauma to be found here.
But there were so many small things that had been tweaked and changed that I was really distracted from the main relationships at times. The screenwriter, Peter Bowker, chose to re-set the action of the novel from 1801 to 1848 for reasons I could not quite discern. Really — how many novels begin with such a concrete assertion of place and time? Was it for the sake of costuming? Was it because he wanted to locate the novel’s action approximately at the time of its publication? If he was realigning the time frame of the novel to fit with either of those reasons or some other, I didn’t feel like it was a justified choice within the adaptation. Sometimes a time shift can work (Sandy Welch reconfiguring North and South so that the characters could attend the 1851 Great Exhibition is a good example, in my mind), but when it’s done for seemingly arbitrary reasons, it doesn’t make sense to me.
