IndieWIRE’s Oliver Lyttelton
…Arnold eschewed the starry route when she took the job, casting mostly unknown teens and twentysomethings in the key roles. Was this some craven attempt to appeal to “Twilight” fans (the book being a favorite of characters within the vampire franchise)? More importantly, would Arnold taking on such well-known literary material lead to her abandoning what made her earlier work so special, and turning out yet another airless costume drama? Happily, not in the least, in either case. While Brontë purists might take issue with some of Arnold’s creative decisions, they also manage to make it a radical, but entirely successful, version, one that might be her most uncompromising film yet. It might be a period piece, but that doesn’t mean Arnold is pulling her punches.
The thing is, the changes to the established order aren’t really changes at all, but instead are steps towards Brontë‘s original intention. The youthful casting (and splitting of the roles) helps to bring to life a world where, thanks to disease, exposure and unsafe childbirth, few live past forty, and the actors are closer to the ages intended by the author than any previous version. The other shake-up is a bigger leap, but it works beautifully. Heathcliff is described as dark and gypsy-like in the novel, but whereas recent inhabitants of the part have included Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy, Arnold has cast black actors in the role.
In the 2011 version, the character begins unable to speak any English, and is marked by whip-marks and brandings on his back, clearly a former slave of some kind, and it goes an enormous way to emphasizing his outsider role in the Yorkshire community, adding extra charge to his cruel treatment (witness Edgar saying that he’s dressed “like a little circus monkey”) without ever betraying the source material. It all adds up to the most sympathetic Heathcliff that we can recall on screen…
No detail escapes Robbie Ryan‘s camera (career-best work from someone who is already one of our favorite active cinematographers), from sunlight catching the dust kicked up by violence to a tear-like droplet of blood off a hanging pheasant (those who can’t stand to watch violence towards animals may be forced to look elsewhere in several places). And night is really night here, with nocturnal scenes only faintly visible, untainted by light pollution of any kind. But unlike Malick’s most recent film, there’s grace in nature, but there’s also brutality; the moors are a place as savage as some of the characters.
…It’s not quite a tearjerker, Arnold playing up the anger of the novel, and we sort of feel that’s the way that it should be. It is, however, incredibly powerful, extremely sexy (there’s one scene that takes place between Cathy and Heathcliff after the latter has been caned that’s more erotic than anything we’ve seen in a while), and a truly remarkable reinvention of a text that beforehand, we weren’t sure we ever needed to see on screen again. Arnold might misstep a little at the last with the use of a new song, “The Enemy,” by Mumford & Sons, but for 99% of the running time the 2011 version of “Wuthering Heights” is a model of how to bring a classic novel kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.