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Oct 23, 201280For less patient viewers, the film might play out like an endurance test, a two-hour documentary on wind. But as unforgiving as the glacially paced film is, it's nonetheless utterly absorbing - a cool pink tongue flicking against an open wound. [18 Oct 2012]
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63If the new Wuthering Heights makes you uncomfortable, that's part of Andrea Arnold's game plan.
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80Arnold's newest testament to passion and squalor strikes a tone somewhere between Cary Fukinaga's emo "Jane Eyre" and Sophia Coppola's revisionist-hip "Marie Antoinette."
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75What she hasn't done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel's passages, particularly from the later chapters, it's dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted. I suppose life on an isolated moor was like that at the time, but do we need this much atmosphere?
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63Arnold's interpretation is taciturn, often entirely without dialogue, though it becomes increasingly conventional in its scene structure as it goes and as the actors hand off the key roles. In reality it's a bit of a slog. ... The movie plays like an idea for a 'Wuthering Heights' adaptation.
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83Willful, meandering, and intriguing, this Wuthering Heights is similarly headstrong.
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60It's just that there isn't enough story - the book shouldn't be required reading for the film to make sense.
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63If you can handle the glacial pacing and lack of dialogue, there is a certain squirmy satisfaction to watching this well-worn story of love, cruelty and madness play out minus the long-winded speeches and romantic catharsis.
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63Arnold's Wuthering Heights has its doom-laden moments of urgency and heartache, but vast swaths of the (longish) film just seem to meander across the muddy hills.
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67The environment is one of unrelenting cruelty and misanthropy, which certainly brings out the novel's darker themes, but can be something of a slog to watch.
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90This may test your patience, it's not for everyone, it's a stretch to call this "entertainment" and so on. As far as Heathcliff being black – well, deal with it. Arnold's simply right about that one, and it's Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes and all those costume-drama versions of the story that are wrong.
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25The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless.
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75In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.
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90Still, for me, Wuthering Heights' almost impersonal immersion in the light and texture and sound of the moors was the source of its vividness and necessity. In order for the art of literary adaptation to remain vital, we have to be willing to let directors throw aside the book and film their dream of it.
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91It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.
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80Perhaps above everything else, Arnold returns us to the most potent fact about the Cathy and Heathcliff love affair: it is a love affair between equals, not between a woman with coquettish "erotic capital" and a man with property and status.
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70The grunts and howls seem every bit as mannered as the florid diction of Olivier and Oberon, perhaps even more so. Their artifice, like Brontë's own, was overt, whereas Ms. Arnold strives to disguise hers in the trappings of authenticity. And as a result, the impact - the grandeur, the art - of Wuthering Heights is diminished.
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50Almost nothing engages us emotionally. [8 Oct. 2012, p.86]
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100Wuthering Heights is a model of how to bring a classic novel kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.
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Sep 29, 201280Faithful and bold adaptation.
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80Arnold's vibrant, Malickian adaptation has another bold stroke worth mentioning: Heathcliff, a Gypsy in the original text, is now an Afro-Caribbean former slave, initially a bruised teen (Glave) and then an unusual, self-made man (Howson).
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50The new Wuthering Heightsis all gloomy moors and muck, but not much convincing passion.
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Oct 2, 201270Heathcliff does not get the revenge he wants because he wants to escape the specific traumas of his adolescent past, shown in the film's first half. And because Arnold traps her viewers with Heathcliff's murky version of events. There's no room for enriching subtext in this version of Wuthering Heights because all the information we need is inscribed on the film's glassy surface.
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Oct 11, 201250Her approach to the material is fresh, considering her focus on the messy, muddy landscape as a metaphor for the story's unbridled relationships. But with so much attention paid to mood and imagery, emotions seem to get lost in the wind.