Wuthering Heights on ITV1 – Review

Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley are Heathcliff and Cathy in Two-Parter

Aug 26, 2009

Emily Brontë's unique drama of obsession and revenge is given the full costume-drama treatment by ITV1, but fails to capture its unsettling Gothic intensity.

To say Heathcliff loves Cathy is like observing that crack addicts are partial to cocaine. Heathcliff and Cathy don’t just love each other, they’re bonded in a mutually destructive fixation.

Their unhinged craving makes it hard to look away from their car-crash romance but also difficult to dramatise it convincingly onscreen.

From Laurence Oliver and Merle Oberon (1939), to Anna Calder-Marshall and Timothy Dalton (1970) and onto Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes (1992), there have been many versions, but none hit the heights, so to speak. (Watch out, next year Gemma Arterton and Ed Westwick are taking to the moors.)

Murky Desires and Foreboding

ITV1’s 2009 version tells the story well enough in primetime Sunday evening, costume-drama fashion, but while the bonnets, beautiful moors (captured by Swedish cinematographer Ulf Brantas) and horse-drawn carriages are all here, Emily Brontë’s murky desires and foreboding atmosphere are more elusive. Tortured yearning played out as a chocolate-box love story makes it feel all wrong.

Having pulled together a watchable cast and hot writer to adapt the novel, ITV have squeezed it into two parts so that the plot is skipped through without Cathy and Heathcliff’s strange attraction ever ripening convincingly.

Tom Hardy Is a Forceful Heathcliff

Still, Tom Hardy is a forceful enough presence as Heathcliff, though Charlotte Riley, seen recently opposite Hardy in Martina Cole’s The Take on Sky1, doesn’t quite have the wild earthiness to work as Cathy. Andrew Lincoln in the thankless role of eager Edgar, the toff who poaches Cathy for his wife, plays his character well as a challenge to Heathcliff.

Sarah Lancashire is Nelly, whose relevance to the story is less than in the novel (in which she is narrator), and Burn Gorman is suitably horrid as Hindley, Heathcliff’s foster brother and chief tormentor.

Bonding Sexually

Award-winning writer Peter Bowker has been prominent on TV this year, with Occupation and Desperate Romantics recently preceding Wuthering Heights. Of the three, Occupation, starring James Nesbitt, has been his best and most compelling.

Bowker reshapes Wuthering Heights in little ways that sometimes seem arbitary. The action is shifted from 1801 to 1848, Cathy and Heathcliff are young adults rather than aged 12/13 when Mr Earnshaw dies (perhaps so they can bond sexually onscreen), and the drama starts as Heathcliff tries to entrap Linton and Catherine and then flashes back to his arrival as an orphan.

Vengeful, Sadistic

Tom Hardy, who this year was psychotic Freddie in The Take and the violent Charles Bronson in the movie life story of the notorious criminal, is clearly an actor who can tap into his dark side.

They don’t come much darker than vengeful, sadistic Heathcliff and Hardy’s performance holds this Wuthering Heights together. The stray orphan brought home and named Heathcliff by Mr Earnshaw – ‘gypsy brat’ and ‘bastard’ to almost everyone else – is such a disturbing figure that he cries out for charismatic acting, and Hardy provides it.

Necrophilia

Bowker emphasises just how off-the-scale Brontë’s anti-hero is when he shows Heathcliff disinterring Cathy’s corpse, getting into the coffin and stroking her skeleton – ‘Please come home,’ he pines. It’s a bold moment. Heathcliff may look like a gorgeous hero from a classic English novel but most fans of romantic fiction will find that his necrophilia is the kiss of death for them.

Cathy and Heathcliff are such a dangerous pair (it is really her daughter, Catherine, and Hindley’s son, Hareton, who are the romantic models here) that Wuthering Heights defies traditional TV costume schmaltz.

Perhaps Heathcliff and Cathy should be in a film by Lars Von Trier. That would offer a sharper view of their psychosis and really shake up cosy Sunday night telly.

Wuthering Heights ITV1 Part 1 Sunday, 30 August 2009, 9-10.30pm. Part 2 Monday 31 August 9pm

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