Wuthering Heights

"Full credit to director Andrea Arnold for taking such a bold and distinctive approach to Emily Brontë 's account of sweeping passion on the Yorkshire moors," writes the Guardian 's Xan Brooks . "Her line in creative vandalism rips off the layers of fluffy chiffon that have adhered to the tale through the course of numerous stage and screen adaptations. It pushes the story all the way back to its original 1847 incarnation and then beyond, up-river, into primordial sludge. What comes back is a beautiful rough beast of a movie, a costume drama like no other. This might not be warm, or even approachable, but it is never less than bullishly impressive." "You call tell almost immediately that this Wuthering Heights is a film by Andrea Arnold, the writer-director of Red Road and Fish Tank ," writes Time Out London 's Dave Calhoun . "This might be the British filmmaker's first literary adaptation, but all her trademarks are there, from the woozy camerawork capturing motes of dust in the sunshine and almost-square, Academy screen ratio to the use of natural light and the up-close-and-then-some relationship with one character. In this austere, elemental version of Emily Brontë's 1840s novel, that character is Heathcliff, played first by Solomon Glave and later by James Howson . Arnold's Heathcliff is not the gypsy of the novel. Instead, he's black, or mixed-race, and the reluctant members of his new family in a farmhouse on a wind-battered Yorkshire moor react as you might expect to their father's act of charity in adopting this vagrant, considering the period and the locale — 'He's not my brother, he's a nigger,' spits a young hot-head." "This makes the hostility he encounters much more overtly racist," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety , "and adds a contempo resonance given the interracial romance that develops between him and Catherine Earnshaw (first Shannon Beer , then Kaya Scodelario ), whose father (Paul Hilton ) adopts Heathcliff and brings him to live at the Earnshaws' isolated moorland farm. However, the casting also chips away at the realism, as it becomes more implausible that Heathcliff would have found a way to earn so much money when he comes back a wealthy man in the story's second half. That said, there's some justification in the way the original text continually refers to Heathcliff's black eyes and hair, as well as his 'black' moods and temperament. In the end, however, the trickiness of the casting is the least of the pic's problems. More challenging is its languorous repetitiveness, burdened as it is with too many (admittedly beautiful) sequences in the early going in which Heathcliff and Catherine frolic like lambs amid the heather, luxuriating in a quasi-incestuous but ultimately chaste intimacy." "The film had been in development for years," notes Oliver Lyttelton at the Playlist . "Natalie Portman was originally attached to a version helmed by John Maybury ( Love is the Devil ), before Abbie Cornish stepped in, with Michael Fassbender set to play the key role of Heathcliff, while another about-turn in 2009 saw Peter Webber ( The Girl with the Pearl Earring ) in the director's chair, with Gemma Arterton and Ed Westwick in the two lead roles (we can't be the only people to be glad that didn't come to pass…). But Arnold eschewed the starry route when she took the job… 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… 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." As it happens, Cary Fukunaga 's adaptation of Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre opens in the UK on Friday. David Jenkins grants it four out of five stars in Time Out London . At any rate, a few weeks ago, the Telegraph asked a few high-