Wuthering Heights (1992)

Very disappointing...

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

While Ralph Fiennes is one of the best Heathcliffs I've ever seen and I was elated that the second generation was kept intact, this 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights left me indifferent. Accurate to the book it may be (for the most part), but as a film on its own merits, it isn't nearly as entertaining as other versions are.Juliette Binoche is miscast as the passionate Catherine, proving much too cold for the part (a problem shared with the 1939 version, which cast the equally icy Merle Oberon). It was also a mistake to have her play her own daughter, Cathy: the character is supposed to resemble her father Edgar, not her mother. Sticking a blonde wig on her is not good enough.While I'm glad the second generation is there, they rush through it much too quickly, to the point where it felt tacked on. A shame, but I'll give the filmmakers points for trying at least. It's more than the other feature length versions of the book have done.The look of the film is good, capturing the wild beauty of the moors and the genteel life of the 18th century upper class. The mood is appropriately Gothic. The music composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto is beautiful, capturing the raw emotion and darkness of the story just as well as Michel Legrand's score for the 1970 version captured the longing and otherworldly aspects. I enjoyed the framing device with Emily Bronte herself wandering the wilderness, going through an abandoned house as she begins to tell the story in voice over.Overall, not a bad film and one of the better versions in terms of faithfulness to the original text, but Binoche's miscasting bogs down the central relationship and the rushed ending takes away much enjoyment.

Famously, this portrays for the first time the whole of the story in the book, it is captivating and moves fast, and Fiennes deserves superlatives as the diabolical Heathcliff, menacing but with the eyes of a wounded animal. There's something worthwhile here. That is the love story with love that was not consummated, not allowed to because they were from different worlds, because even though they connect in a deep way, the rules of the game say otherwise. Different times, but you can assume that it used to be so at Bronte's time, as it was later in Tolstoy's.So they part, but they have grown roots so deep in each other, they cannot be parted, and distance only tears at them, distorts who they are, the distortion as memory. In the prisonworld Heathcliff creates in the end as punishing demigod of sorts, without which the story is incomplete, we can see the stark reflection of both the broader unjust world responsible for Heathcliff, and his private hell of vengeful recurring thoughts, both that stifle the soul.All that is good enough in the film. We get to puzzle about the name of Heathcliffe's adopted son being inscribed in a stone epigraph, on the door of a manor that was built centuries ago.What isn't very satisfying is how we arrive at the story. The character who it is being narrated to, arrives at the manor, pores over books and images of Catherine, is captivated enough to dream of her, which leads to the housemaid's narration of the events. Instead of a dream, the visitor here sees Catherine's ghost, which sets a supernatural tone that is too obvious. Too obvious because though even Bronte suggested ghosts, her main narrative gambit was layered dreaming, the notion that the hidden life of images and urges shapes the narrator's choosing of the story he tells about himself and things, some of which we externalize as destiny or demons, which is what we all do each time we remember, we dream of a story around a fictitious self.But it's wonderful and moving as it is.

Great job at reconstructing the Wuthering Heights residence the way it is described in the book. As for the fact that this production tries to cover the full story, I can't help feeling that cramming so much detail in the space of just 105 minutes has chopped a story otherwise full of pathos into a mere chronology. What saves the attempt is, however, the rather excellent cast - although I must confess that, based on the book, I was expecting Edgar to be a lot better looking :D. Overall, this production looks promising but hugely unfinished. Sadly (for a fan of Juliette Binoche), not the kind of production I would want to watch again. The need for concision granted, I can still find no excuse for the particularly disappointing music. Having seen a few Stanley Kubrick productions not long ago (the music of The Shining in my ears...), I find the music of this production inexcusably drab.

Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite romantic English novels.That's why I was curios to see all the movies based on this book. Unfornutately, this version was a great disappointment for me, taking into consideration the actors chosen for playing Cathy and Heathcliff. Will all due respect, Fiennes and Binoche are too "soft" and unconvincing, compared with the wild, intensely passionate and powerful characters they were supposed to play. On the other hand, I think that the physical resemblance of the actors with the characters imagined in the book are also extremely important, in order to give force and credibility to the cinematographic version of the novel. For these reasons, in my opinion, the best film based on Bronte's Wuthering Heights remains the one made in 1939, with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.