Four stars By Dave Calhoun\n\nYou call tell almost immediately that this \u2018Wuthering Heights\u2019 is a film by Andrea Arnold, the writer-director of \u2018Red Road\u2019 and \u2018Fish Tank. This might be the British filmmaker\u2019s first literary adaptation, but all her trademarks are there, from the woozy camerawork capturing motes of dust in the sunshine and almost-square, Academy screen ratio to the use of natural light and the up-close-and-then-some relationship with one character.\n \nIn this austere, elemental version of Emily Bronte\u2019s 1840s novel, that character is Heathcliff, played first by Solomon Glave and later by James Howson. Arnold\u2019s Heathcliff is not the gypsy of the novel. Instead, he\u2019s black, or mixed-race, and the reluctant members of his new family in a farmhouse on a wind-battered Yorkshire moor react as you might expect to their father\u2019s act of charity in adopting this vagrant, considering the period and the locale \u2013 \u2018He\u2019s not my brother, he\u2019s a nigger, \u2019 spits a young hot-head.\n \nLike most screen versions, Arnold\u2019s film drops its curtain when Heathcliff\u2019s almost-lover Cathy (Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario), also his adopted sister, leaves the story, so ignoring its second half. But unlike most, this spin on the well-worn classic pays as much attention to the weather and assorted animals, plants and insects as it does to the emotional heft of the tragedy of unrealised love as its core. Nature offers numerous cameos from hawks, dogs, rabbits, sheep, starlings and beetles. Thistles and oaks, too, get repeated walk-ons. For Arnold, the details of landscape and wildlife are substitutes for easy dialogue and exposition.\n \nThe film\u2019s interest in dirt and dust, and blood and bogs, brings to mind the earthiness, if not the punk aesthetic, of Andrew K\u00f6tting\u2019s Emile Zola adaptation, \u2018This Filthy Earth\u2019, although the intimate photographing of nature recalls Terrence Malick (\u2018Days of Heaven\u2019, \u2018Tree of Life\u2019) too of course. There\u2019s also a touch of the Ken Loach of \u2018Days of Hope\u2019 or Bill Douglas of \u2018Comrades\u2019 in its unfussy, non-decorous approach to period drama \u2013 although, unlike those filmmakers, Arnold prefers that her characters say not much at all. Arnold clearly associates the literary with talk and the poetic with silence. It\u2019s an approach that causes hiccups when we end up feeling more distant from some key characters than we should.\n \nThis silence and the cosying-up closely to Heathcliff only become a problem in the film\u2019s later stages. Here, older Heathcliff and Cathy are not as interesting as their younger selves \u2013 and nor are the actors playing them. Howson looks more lost than he should and Scodelario is a thin presence. The film\u2019s later chapters feel too much like standard melodrama with the sound turned off \u2013 and by this stage Robbie Ryan\u2019s exquisite imagery becomes a touch too repetitive. Enough with the dogs and fog, you feel.\n \nBut the best of the film \u2013 the first hour at least \u2013 is excellent. Arnold\u2019s strongest work goes into exploring Heathcliff and Cathy\u2019s early, tentative romance with smart tenderness and a visceral sense of where pain meets pleasure and how youngsters turn to playful violence when they don\u2019t understand or can\u2019t control love. Glave and Beer work fantastically well together. A scene of them fighting in the mud is beautiful and contains all the longing necessary to explain the pain of their later estrangement. Arnold is great, too, at stressing and exploring Heathcliff\u2019s isolation in his new home, often showing us only what he sees as he lurks round corners or peers through cracks in doors.\n \nThis \u2018Wuthering Heights\u2019 looks astounding and there are clever decisions in almost every scene. Its lack of final tragedy, though, is a problem, and by the end you feel just as shut off from the world around him as Heathcliff does \u2013 a stranger in his own story. You could say that feeling itself is a smart one to impart \u2013 but it\u2019s not entirely satisfying.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/div>","fnc":"googleTrackerHelper.doTrackPage( '\/'Wuthering-Heights-film_options~37522'\/Reviews\/ViewAll\/1' );"}