This is definitely a movie made to inspire one of my more jerk-offy self-indulgent reviews, where I wax poetic like about the textures of sod and sun-kissed cotton dresses, and bless it for that. I love being told it's alright to be self-indulgent! (Of course I do. I write a blog.) Andrea Arnold's take on Emily Brontë's classic is not for everybody's tastes but man alive is it well-suited to mine. She sticks her camera right down there in the dirt and makes it the prettiest darn thing you ever did see. Dialogue? We don't need no stinking dialogue! The story's told probably about as wordlessly as you could get away with; when the words do come, they count. The earlier passages with the younger Catherine (Shannon Beer) and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) are my favorites just because they evoke so much with so little talk - the visuals and the performances evoke plenty on their own. That's not to slight the second half, but the ghosts of those first scenes haunt the whole film (indeed Arnold cuts back to them repeatedly) and they haunt it well. I haven't read Heights since I was in high school but I don't recall it ever burrowing itself so deep, emotionally, before; Arnold taps into something raw here that I found unexpected given the source material but I should've known better, given the director.
As an aside, this movie broke my pointless embargo against Mumford & Sons - I'd avoided listening to them because they just seemed like the tween-ready radio-friendly version of all the tweed-rocking hipster folk bands I've already been listening to for half my life, and there's nothing a hipster loves so much as a corporate late-comer to intellectually boo at. Anyway I really love the song "The Enemy" by them that plays over the final few moments of Arnold's film, so the joke's on me. I'm surprised this wasn't on the radar for the Oscars. .
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1 comment:
nice review. i loved the photography in this movie & the sound design.
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