"With its title stylised in quotation marks, and a director's statement that it's intended to capture her experience of reading the book aged 14, it uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable. Adaptation or not, it's an astonishingly hollow work."
"Some of this, it can be argued, was already signalled by the film's casting and the choice to obliterate any mention of race, colonialism, or ostracisation in the telling of pseudo-siblings Cathy and Heathcliff's destructive codependence. Heathcliff, whose ethnically ambiguous appearance is of great concern to every other character in the book, is played by white Australian actor Jacob Elordi."
A modern adaptation of Wuthering Heights repurposes the novel into a vehicle for distraction rather than intellectual expansion. The production stylises its title with quotation marks and frames the film as capturing a teenage reading experience, using interpretation as a guise to strip the novel's emotional violence. The adaptation obliterates references to race, colonialism, and ostracisation in the portrayal of Cathy and Heathcliff. Heathcliff is played by a white actor, erasing his ethnically ambiguous status that fuels other characters' concerns. Cathy is cast as a blonde, blue-eyed figure, minimizing social tensions tied to appearance and class. The film adapts only the first half of the story and favors marketable romance tropes over the source's raw rage and emotional drive.
Read at The Independent
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