I was seventeen when I first read Wuthering Heights in an English Literature class. Like most of the boys in the class (of which there were about 4) I was sceptical about the novel, believing it to be a soppy romance. I could not have been more wrong and four hundred pages later I was labelling it the greatest novel I have ever read. I still do.
This 1992 adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel is not the first attempt to put the book on the big screen but it was the first attempt to adapt the entire novel on film. Usually the emphasis is solidly on the first half of the novel which contains the "love story" as opposed to the second half which is much more focused on Heathcliff's revenge.
Ralph Fiennes is wonderful as Heathcliff, balancing energy and passion without ever venturing into gothic excess. The character could easily descend into charicature but here he manages to elicit sympathy and disgust simultaneously. He invests Heathcliff with such a dark coldness and emotional reserve that it is easy to see why he was cast as Amon Goeth in Schindler's List a year later.
It is hard not to appreciate the ambition of this adaptation, unfortunately it is equally hard to brand it a success. Aside from Fiennes as Heathcliff, the casting is so low key and the characters so weakly established that a good knowledge of the novel is required simply to follow who each of the characters are and how they are related to one another.
There are also superfluous elements that could easily have been chopped to make more time for the central threads of the story. Lockwood, although the narrator of the novel, adds little because his appearance is so brief, whilst Sinead O'Connor's role as Emily Bronte is an addition that is utterly unnecessary.
Worse yet, Juliette Binoche is badly miscast here as Catherine (and later Cathy) Earnshaw. Certainly she is striking but her accent perplexes and she is completely overwhelmed by her more charismatic and impressive male co-star.
The production design is underwhelming and the camerawork fails to make the most of Yorkshire's impressive geography. For instance there is a scene with Heathcliff and Cathy on this impressive field of rocks, yet the camerawork is so drab that what could have been a memorable and awe-inspiring scene just blends into the body of the picture.
With edits to the script and more time devoted to the minor characters being established this film could have been substantially better, although Binoche's lack of screen presence here would have remained.
I commend the production for demonstrating some ambition but the results here suggest that Bronte's novel is better suited to the slow unfolding of character possible in a mini-series than the faster pace that films require.