Emily Bronte's sweeping epic is raw and brutal. How this tale of a violently thwarted primal force has ended up on tea towels and treacle tins is a question only money can answer
Either way, director Andrea Arnold has taken the shaky, urban tics she perfected in Fish Tank and put them on a bus to Yorkshire, there to endure the hardships of the rain-lashed moors.
She presents, with savage realism, slavering, salivating Nature as it slowly erodes stones and souls - every wheeling lapwing, fright-eyed rabbit, growling dog, muddy puddle and rasping horse.
The wind (carrying with it rain, snow, despair) howls across the screen and into the auditorium.
Trouble is, so busy is the camera making a Great Film with its mosaic fragments, sly glimpses and unannounced taciturn epiphanies that somewhere along the way the love story has been relegated to a minor intrusion.
The unfulfilled courtship of Heathcliff and Cathy is seemingly played out in real-time as their troubled union becomes a small corner of a 500-piece jigsaw with an undeniably enchanting picture on the box.
Arnold concentrates on the pair when they were teenagers using untrained actors to create the clumsiness of puppy love.
Shannon Beer is delightfully modern and unselfconscious as the young Cathy, happy with mud on her boots, developing a tough-but-tender relationship with Solomon Glave's monosyllabic ex-slave Heathcliff who riles Hindley by being black and being there.
The youngsters tumble gracelessly down the fells, speckled with earth and - prompted by the moistness and fecundity that surrounds them - slowly figure out that cruelty, life and their futures are somehow joined.
Everything is dripping and breeding and urgent. Except the film, which never suggests anything other than a stifled crush between the protagonists.
When they grow up and out, older Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) and older Heathcliff James Howson appear more irritated by life's vicissitudes than destroyed in that Byronesque way that makes a thousand schoolgirls sigh.
This is a mood piece, a collage. The camera is a key character, untutored in its gawping, fascinated with every fleck of phlegm and chomping jaw, transfixed in its sensual wonder of the intractable forces of season and time.
Within this powerful setting, little lives become inconsequential. That, sadly, is the opposite of the story.
– From November 2011
