Review: Wuthering Heights; Running time: 128mins; Certificate: 15 (From York Press)

Review: Wuthering Heights; Running time: 128mins; Certificate: 15

12:20pm Friday 11th November 2011 in Film reviews By Charles Hutchinson

LAURENCE Oliver and Merle Oberon in 1939. Anna Calder-Marshall and Timothy Dalton in 1970. Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes in 1992 (with singer Sinead O’Connor popping up briefly as Emily Bronte bestriding the moors).

Now Andrea Arnold breaks free from the star-name syndrome, instead favouring first-time film actor James Howson and Skins cast member Kaya Scodelario as the adult Heathcliff and Cathy.

What’s more she entrusts a couple of Yorkshire 14 year olds with their film debut as the young version of the doomed lovers, giving Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer the bulk of the film. Meanwhile, York dance instructor and barmaid Simone Jackson was plucked from Coney Street, when standing outside Poundworld, to play servant Nelly Dean.

If you are going to do another Wuthering Heights – a novel that has suffered unmentionable crimes on screen and stage – then better to be daring and damned than merely pussyfoot around the bleak book’s interminable withering lows after Cathy’s death.

Andrea Arnold was the no-nonsense director behind Red Road and the BAFTA-winning Fish Tank, and once more she holds no truck with poncy art, riding roughshod over Bronte’s writing, taking more liberties than Carlos Tevez, but still reviving the previously flogged dead horse.

Arnold has the “wuthering” bit off to a tee, aided by Robbie Ryan’s photography of a moorland constantly blasted with rain and battered by the winds. Ain’t no sunshine in Heathcliff either, who is seen banging his head against a wall in the opening flash-forward scene, a metaphor for what kind of impact Arnold will have on Bronte’s story.

For the first time on screen, Heathcliff – the “dark-as-Satan”, homeless gipsy boy found on the Liverpool streets by hill farmer Mr Earnshaw – is played by black actors, a step that makes you wonder why that has not happened before.

Earnshaw’s sullen son, Hindley (Lee Shaw), refers to him only by the ‘N’ word, while he and Heathcliff trade rustic insults and Heathcliff invites the posh Lintons to “eff off you ‘c’s” You won’t find that in your Bronte-saurus, and purists no doubt will be spluttering on their nice Bronte biscuits, but hey, given the target audience, it works, adding another layer of grit.

Arnold’s depiction of the obsessive love of the farmer’s daughter and the new whipping boy works too, building the lovers’ bond against a tide of prejudice as they roam and romp in the mud. The hand-held camerawork when they rush across the moors, on foot or horseback, is a particularly effective visual tool, and the director regularly uses close-ups of animals and insects to make a link with nature.

The script works best when the least is said by the young Heathcliff and Cathy, with Howson and Scodelario being less well served, although the emphasis is placed more on physicality, right down to Heathcliff giving Cathy’s corpse up close and personal attention beyond the book’s boundaries.

Arnold doesn’t labour the post-death years, her least controversial decision and one in keeping with the shorter, sharper concentration span of restless modern film-making.