Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Released abroad in 1992, this handsome, distant, unaffecting adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights makes its belated video debut thanks largely to its then largely unknown, now star-packed cast. The English Patient's Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes lead this version, which admirably attempts to capture the whole of its source material (as opposed to past versions, which have been content to tell only half the story). Unfortunately, while Fiennes does make an appropriately poisonous Heathcliff, there's not much to Wuthering Heights beyond handsome Yorkshire landscapes and some good bits of dialogue stolen from the book. Even the always-reliable Binoche is hard to swallow as both the elder and younger Catherine, and the presence of Sinead O'Connor, who narrates the story and appears as Brontë herself, only adds to the confusion. An interesting attempt, but in the end, it's not interesting enough.

 
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