The New Yorker:

By Joshua Rothman

If someone approaches you and suggests that you make a film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” don’t do it! Dozens of adaptations have been made since 1920, when the first film version was released, and, time and time again, “Wuthering Heights” has proven to be a trap for the artists who want to reinvent it. People love “Wuthering Heights” not just for its romance but also for its strangeness, its intensity, and its violence. (It begins, more or less, with a middle-aged man slicing open a little girl’s wrist on a broken pane of glass.) Unfortunately, those are precisely the qualities that adaptations tend to cut out. The events of “Wuthering Heights,” which we can picture so vividly in our imaginations, can come to seem cartoonish onscreen; the plot won’t fit into a hundred and twenty minutes. The novel is eccentric and unsettling, furious and infuriating, murky and luminous; it has a small cast but, as in a tragedy, you feel that the fate of the world is at stake. Subtract the weirdness—as most adaptations, including the new film, directed by Andrea Arnold, inevitably must—and all that’s left behind is a love story. “Wuthering Heights,” unfortunately, is as much a love story as “Hamlet” is a revenge thriller.

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