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By: Andrew O’Hehir
Some people will be thrilled by Andrea Arnold’s raw and daring reimagining of “Wuthering Heights” – and you can count me among them – and other people will be irritated or massively bored. But whatever you make of it, this movie isn’t like any British costume drama you’ve ever seen before. Arnold, the Scottish filmmaker whose previous work includes the gritty urban thriller “Red Road”and the intense sexual melodrama “Fish Tank,” isn’t going after Emily Brontë’s classic romance in some spirit of avant-gardism or postmodernism or anything like that. If anything, this is a pre-modern,stripped-down “Wuthering Heights,” an attempt to dig through the pages and pages of florid melodrama back to the elemental truths of life and love on the damp and frigid Yorkshire moors.
Considerable attention has been paid to the fact that Arnold has cast two actors of Afro-Caribbean heritage to play Heathcliff, the archetypal tortured romantic hero of Brontë’s novel. (Solomon Glave plays the foundling Heathcliff, in the early portion of the story, and the supremely handsome James Howson plays the adult gentleman who returns to reclaim his lost love.) But that only seems like a bizarre contemporary twist if you go by the film and TV versions, in which we’ve only seen white actors like Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes or Tom Hardy take on the role. I mean, maybe Arnold has some political or cultural agenda about how Britain has always been a polyglot society, long before the era of immigration, but also maybe not. Fact is, in Brontë’s book, Heathcliff is pretty clearly not white,and what’s more he’s a character who befuddles the racial distinctions of the day. (read the rest at the link)

(via Pick of the week: An earthy, sexy new “Wuthering Heights”)

DID SOMEONE SAY “WUTHERING HEIGHTS”.

By: Andrew O’Hehir

Some people will be thrilled by Andrea Arnold’s raw and daring reimagining of “Wuthering Heights” – and you can count me among them – and other people will be irritated or massively bored. But whatever you make of it, this movie isn’t like any British costume drama you’ve ever seen before. Arnold, the Scottish filmmaker whose previous work includes the gritty urban thriller “Red Road”and the intense sexual melodrama “Fish Tank,” isn’t going after Emily Brontë’s classic romance in some spirit of avant-gardism or postmodernism or anything like that. If anything, this is a pre-modern,stripped-down “Wuthering Heights,” an attempt to dig through the pages and pages of florid melodrama back to the elemental truths of life and love on the damp and frigid Yorkshire moors.

Considerable attention has been paid to the fact that Arnold has cast two actors of Afro-Caribbean heritage to play Heathcliff, the archetypal tortured romantic hero of Brontë’s novel. (Solomon Glave plays the foundling Heathcliff, in the early portion of the story, and the supremely handsome James Howson plays the adult gentleman who returns to reclaim his lost love.) But that only seems like a bizarre contemporary twist if you go by the film and TV versions, in which we’ve only seen white actors like Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes or Tom Hardy take on the role. I mean, maybe Arnold has some political or cultural agenda about how Britain has always been a polyglot society, long before the era of immigration, but also maybe not. Fact is, in Brontë’s book, Heathcliff is pretty clearly not white,and what’s more he’s a character who befuddles the racial distinctions of the day. (read the rest at the link)

(via Pick of the week: An earthy, sexy new “Wuthering Heights”)