The important thing about adaptations isn’t what’s taken out but what’s put in. Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”—or, as she’d have it, “ ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ” complete with scare quotes—is the season’s second Frankenstein movie, because Fennell takes bits and pieces from Emily Brontë’s novel and, adding much of her own imagining, reassembles them into a misbegotten thing that wants only to be loved. And paying audiences seem to love it, even if many critics don’t.
What’s lovable about it is love itself: Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is an unabashedly romantic movie emerging at a time when few such films are being made—at least, for theatrical release and by directors with some artistic cachet. It’s unlikely that many viewers have been fretting about the quality of the adaptation, and I’m in sympathy with such indifference, whether it arises from not having read the novel on which the film is based or just not caring about (literary) fidelity. Rushing to defend a literary source against a supposed cinematic mauling is often little more than an attempt to signal culturedness and education; it’s a matter of judging a movie on the basis of a principle, even a prejudice (and the pride that goes with it), rather than on experience. Yes, I also sometimes compare films with their literary source and criticize them on that basis, but I also know why I do so: not to protect that source (even the worst filmmakers aren’t burning the books, just misunderstanding them) but to complain that the movie isn’t as good as the book itself and to try to figure out why not.
Perhaps the worst thing that Hollywood’s long-standing formulaic approach has done is to convince even sophisticated critics that movies can’t rival literature as exalted artistic achievements. If films had always been made with the degree of freedom that is common in the literary sphere, the notion of their equality with books—something that’s generally accepted when it comes to music and visual art—wouldn’t be controversial. Tellingly, many movies that reach the heights of the art stem from relatively unexalted sources—gangster stories, say—and when literary adaptations falter it is often because of exaggerated respect for the original, resulting in creative inhibition. Many of the best adaptations range far afield from the source material. But, whether faithful or not, when an adaptation is bad, what’s missing isn’t literature but cinema.
It’s notable that last year’s great adaptation, Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” is even freer than Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” DaCosta’s decision to transplant Ibsen’s 1890 play “Hedda Gabler” from Norway to nineteen-fifties England is minor compared to her expansion of the action from the single drawing room of the play to an uproarious party at a lavish estate, filmed upstairs and down, indoors and out (not to mention other similarly drastic changes). And even that transformation, ingenious as it is—amounting, indeed, to a vital cinematic act of literary criticism—would count for little had the movie not sparked emotional excitements and complications, subtleties and furies, that were all its own, or if the writing and filming and performances had been less aesthetically thrilling and intricately enticing. Likewise, my pick for the best movie of all time, Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear,” turns Shakespeare’s play into a Mafia drama of Don Learo, with a post-apocalyptic premise and a cast of characters that includes a descendant of Shakespeare, a reclusive director, and Norman Mailer as himself. No need to fret about what’s left out (plenty); Godard locates what he persuasively considers the play’s essence and, from there, extrapolates with thematic profundities and stylistic extravagances of overwhelming wonder.
“Wuthering Heights” extrapolates, too, of course. The many truncations and excisions have been detailed copiously, including by my colleague Justin Chang. What Fennell chiefly adds is something that could hardly have been in a novel published in 1847: sex. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, apparently unconsummated in Brontë, is a hot-blooded affair in the movie. Even if its heat is more suggested than unleashed, Fennell renders the pair’s emotional and sexual freedom, too, as signalled in a scene in which Catherine masturbates and Heathcliff, catching her in the act, licks her fingers. What made Fennell’s 2023 melodrama, “Saltburn,” more than just the twisty tale of a social-climbing schemer working his wiles is the seductive power that its interloping protagonist exerts—by way of his own viscous pleasures and secret kinks. In her “Wuthering Heights,” the bonds of cruelty and affliction in Heathcliff’s later relationship with Isabella are turned into an explicitly B.D.S.M. dynamic, in which Isabella delights. (No need for her to escape in Fennell’s version, as she does in the book.)
The effect is to demythologize Brontë. If all that impeded the characters’ sex lives in the book were the law and decorum of the author’s day, why not tell something like the truth? If one revisits the past to dispel myths, one worth dispelling is that of a lost era of chastity. But that’s not what Fennell does. Instead of lifting the lid off history and anchoring the adapted parts of “Wuthering Heights” in the specifics of the period when they’re set (roughly from the American Revolution to the French one), Fennell turns history decorative, decks it out in material fantasies so awkward that it’s unclear whether they are deliberate anachronisms or whether they’re just off.
The overwhelming silliness of the movie falls short of camp—it’s neither intentionally self-parodic nor exaggeratedly theatrical. On the contrary, even its most outlandish and grotesque inventions are portrayed tastefully, with a sheen of aesthetic refinement that turns the most intensely emotional moments into emblems of emotion. The film’s pictorial expression remains under the top. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” isn’t a bad adaptation, just a banal movie, no worse in what it takes from Brontë than in what it tacks on.
Nonetheless, I’m sympathetic to Fennell’s effort, because what she really appears to be adapting is less Brontë than a cinematic genre that has more or less fallen into oblivion: the romantic drama. Though mediocre in itself, “Wuthering Heights” is a kind of placeholder, a symbol of an entire swath of filmmaking that now hardly exists but has been newly brought back to the fore by the ample and ubiquitous archive of streaming. Such movies were long known in Hollywood as “women’s pictures” (even if many of the romantic agonies afflicted the movie’s men, too). The genre’s supreme artists were John M. Stahl (from the silent era through the nineteen-forties) and Douglas Sirk (in the nineteen-fifties), and they were joined by other directors of similar ambition and accomplishment, such as Frank Borzage and George Cukor. Their melodramas of heartbreak and redemption, as in Stahl’s “Only Yesterday” (based on a novella by Stefan Zweig), Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows,” filled with wild coincidences and fervent confessions, are what could be called tearjerkers. These movies have the extraordinary merit of putting the passions of love and the obstacles to relationships front and center, balancing personal desires and social obligations on an equal footing, and thereby lending bourgeois life the grandeur of tragedy.
Few of the best movies of this past year feature much in the way of romance. “Sinners” indeed includes one of the year’s great love stories but keeps it fragmentary, secondary, and, ultimately, symbolic. “The Mastermind” and “Hedda” are downright bitter about love. “The Phoenician Scheme” is a vision of paternal love, and what remains of romantic love is retrospective, a tale of mourning along with a vengeance plot; “One Battle After Another,” too, is a paternal story that starts with a significant but superficially sketched romantic relationship. “Marty Supreme” is driven by romance, and the thinness of its central couple’s relationship—the one that begins and ends the movie—is compensated for by its thematic implication of a bond of ineffable absoluteness, a passion beyond words. In this regard, “Marty Supreme,” set in 1952, reminds me of one of that era’s great movies, “Rear Window,” in which Alfred Hitchcock offers, in a monologue spoken by the superb character actress Thelma Ritter, a definitive credo of transcendently carnal love. But, “Marty Supreme,” true to its title and its eponymous character, isn’t a women’s picture; the romance, sharply conceived though it is, is ultimately little more than a series of obstacles on the protagonist’s athletically existential journey.
Dig further, into this year’s Oscar nominees, and the pattern holds: romantic stories are nonexistent (“Bugonia”) or brief, bland, and merely functional (“Train Dreams”). Looking at the art houses, there’s little difference: “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is decidedly anti-romantic; “The Testament of Ann Lee” is centered on the renunciation of sex. One movie that winks at classics of the genre, Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?,” also shows why the genre now hardly exists; the film is an object lesson in genre collapse. It’s about a man who divorces unhappily, finds solace performing standup comedy, and thereby eventually reunites with his ex-wife; it pays such close, narrow-bore attention to its central relationship and those around it that it seals out just about every other motive, idea, and observation. It’s a relationship suspended in a void.
Another Hollywood-proximate 2025 release that’s entirely about relationships also confronts its subject as much economically as emotionally, boldly planting a scalpel blade between love and marriage: Celine Song’s “Materialists.” It’s about the romantic tribulations (which are also financial quandaries) of a professional matchmaker, and its astringently rational approach to affairs of the heart is its most original aspect. Song brings this notion to life with sharp dialogue, images, and performances—but the story unfortunately gives way to clattery plot mechanisms. Despite the drastic differences in substance and in aesthetic quality of “Materialists” and “Is This Thing On?,” they come off as nearly equally false—because neither addresses the elephant in the room, the virtually shrieking threats to democracy in the United States. What Fennell has purchased, so to speak, with the adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” isn’t just a romantic template but a repudiation of any social consciousness: the content-free, history-free, politics-free populism of a movie about nothing but romance.
And yet—speaking of dispelling myths about the past—the idea that classic Hollywood romances were abstractly apolitical is itself a convenient fiction. John M. Stahl’s “Only Yesterday” is anchored in the Depression, and the plot of his “When Tomorrow Comes” is set in motion by waitresses covertly making a risky plan to go on strike. Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” is one of Hollywood’s most anguished visions of ingrained American racism, and his “All That Heaven Allows” has genuine philosophical scope (with reference to Thoreau). For that matter, “Casablanca,” which dismisses its own romantic obsession in a famous line—“It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”—is a drama of war, of Fascist rule, and of anti-Nazi resistance. Three little people’s romantic quandaries are indeed inextricable from the crazy world. Even in times of horror, couples form, families continue, children are born. Currently, most prestige movies are confronting half of life; Fennell’s movie is at least considering the other.
That’s why, for all the artistic inadequacy of “Wuthering Heights,” I’m cheered by the prospect of its box-office success. Profit breeds emulation, and if romance is back other filmmakers are likely to take it on. Maybe they’ll find a way to do so with a more ample, honest context and a more imaginative style to give it form—to help love find its place in the world and vice versa. ♦