It's hardly a surprise that filmmaker Emerald Fennell, who possesses a particular interest in shocking and riling her audience, was drawn to Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." This is a novel that has vexed critics since the beginning, with one in 1848 decrying its "vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors." Nearly 179 years after its publication, "Wuthering Heights" may have been reappraised a classic, but it continues to haunt with that "wild, wicked slip" Catherine Earnshaw and her tumultuous relationship with Heathcliff, he of the "half-civilized ferocity." It's not just because of the teenagers who can't make it work: Swirling around them are issues of class, race, property, education, inheritance, desire, revenge, trauma and the miserable weather of the Yorkshire moors. Adaptations have taken various liberties with Brontë's story, cutting characters and plot points in vain attempts to condense and tame its wildness and stubborn amorality. A poster for the 1920 film carried with it the tagline "Emily Brontë's tremendous Story of Hate." More than a century later, it's being sold as a great love story, but, you know, with a wink. This is love (if you want to call it that) of the tortured, toxic, obsessive variety. In a noble attempt to do something different, Fennell decided to make a movie that captured how "Wuthering Heights" made her feel the first time she read it, at age 14. It's a heady experiment — a defiantly anti-academic interpretation that lets Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) finally do something about all that pent-up lust. Those quotation marks on the title card promise that this is not Brontë's book at all. Fennell reduces her story to a more simplistic narrative about hate and its polluting ripple effects.... Read More