Let me start by saying I am not the biggest fan of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. However, the casting for the new film adaptation of the book, set to be released on Valentine’s Day, has left me puzzled.
This adaptation is directed, written, and produced by Emerald Fennell, who made her feature directorial debut with the film Promising Young Woman. She also brought Saltburn to the big screen in 2023. She has said that this adaptation is based on her “14-year-old self’s interpretation of the book”.
However, the overall casting for this film has me wondering if, maybe, Fennell missed the whole point. In the book, Heathcliff is described as being a person of color, someone who constantly deals with being racially othered and dehumanized. Edgar Linton, on the other hand, is the personification of British high-class society. So to play these roles, she obviously cast the half-Pakistani, British-Scottish actor Shazad Latif as Heathcliff and the Australian actor Jacob Elordi as Edgar Linton, right?
Nope, in the film, Elordi plays Heathcliff, and Latif plays Edgar Linton. While his origins are left ambiguous in the book, casting Heathcliff as a white man, which audiences cannot easily identify as being racially othered, makes no sense for his character. The whole book is about Heathcliff dealing with racial discrimination and the resulting lifelong trauma.
Some fans argue that maybe Fennell is doing a kind of role-reversal between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. But those who have seen early screenings of the film say that isn’t the case. Instead, Fennell decided to focus on Healthcliff’s lack of money as the main conflict of the film.
I understand that this version is her “childhood fantasy”, but the erasure of the racial plotline doesn’t come off as an interesting subversion; it just screams poor reading comprehension. Heathcliff’s racial othering is a core theme of the book. The difference in social class is the main reason that Heathcliff and Cathy cannot be together. Most of the struggles Heathcliff faces throughout the novel are because he can be visually identified as different.
I think that marketing the movie as “Wuthering Heights” was a mistake. The book is so well-known that, regardless of whether they have read it, viewers will have expectations when seeing the film. Adapting a “fanfiction” version of a classic book or play isn’t anything new, but they are often marketed under a different name. Take Clueless or 10 Things I Hate About You, for example. Both those films stand on their own while still drawing inspiration from classic texts.
I am sure that anyone who tries reading the novel for the first time after watching the film will be disappointed, and anyone who actually likes the book will be leaving theaters confused.
