The History Boys

THE HISTORY BOYS          A-                  

Great Britain  (104 mi)  2005  d:  Nicholas Hytner 

At a time when educational “values” seem lost in a politicized morass, when cultural debates have been reduced to either televised sound bites or talk radio where one side out shouts the other, when it all seems like such an obnoxious way to express oneself, along comes this delightfully insightful film about high school students that is filled with humor, intelligence and wit, that gets to the heart of the characters with their precise choice of words.  School funding has been steadily reduced, forcing cuts in programs such as the arts, which is really altering the cultural landscape of the country.  Everyone knows who sells $200 basketball shoes on TV, but are only vaguely familiar with any except the top-tiered writers.  To ask about painters or composers is simply unthinkable, as if these are age old arts, the kinds of things people studied before the invention of television.  How boring.  Then along comes this eminently appealing play captured on film using the same director and lead parts that scored London and Broadway stage success winning six Tonys, adapted by its author Alan Bennett for the screen, altering to some degree the play’s original emphasis. 

Using the classroom as the stage, we peek into the lives of some of the brightest kids in the working class town of Yorkshire, specifically 8 kids who scored so well on their college entrance exams that they actually have a good chance of getting into Oxford or Cambridge, the icons of British class and intelligence, and are taking an extra term just to prepare them for that possibility.  Not since Michael Winterbottom’s insightful 1996 film JUDE, an adaptation of the late 19th century Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure, have the complexities of British thought, class, and education been explored with such relish and detail.  This film is a huge delight in large part driven by the same elements that made the play such a success—smart, witty, eloquent and precise language as well as the emotional development of character, featuring likeable kids who are undeniably appealing because of their outspoken honesty, especially their ability to express themselves so clearly, and their wonderful support of one another.  No shrinking violets among them, they’re each constantly aware of everything that happens around them, including each other’s business, spending hours of preparation each night, coming to class alertly aware of what’s expected of them, and in class they perform magnificently, offering lucid, well thought-out opinions, reciting literary passages, performing improvised dramatic skits in a foreign language, singing show tunes, including brief excerpts from movies or plays where their teacher has to guess the original source, like playing Stump the Band. 

The teachers are just as outstanding, featuring the jocular yet rotund Richard Griffiths as Mr. Hector, a brilliantly inspirational sixtyish renaissance man who exudes the very soul of knowledge, who plies the curiosity of youth with neverending quotes from poets of all ages, always finding the right turn of phrase to capture any given moment, and in one scene when he’s alone with just one student dissecting a passage from Thomas Hardy, the density of thought in that brief span of time borders on the sublime.  Frances de la Tour is a rock of Gibraltar, her demeanor never changing, offering her expertise on her subject of history, becoming brilliant at one point when suggesting a woman might be present at their college interviews, going on an eloquent description of history as a commentary on the “continuing incapabilities of men.”  The school headmaster (Clive Merrison) on the other hand, is a severely repressed, awards-driven administrator who thinks only of the image of his school, thinking the students themselves are too crass, but need special tutoring from a recent Oxford alum, someone who can shortcut their path to the promised ground.  Stephen Campbell Moore plays young Mr. Irwin, a brilliant student himself who distinguishes his argument by choosing the road not taken, believing no one disputes the truth, which is irrelevant, that all applicants agree on the same facts, so they need to learn how to play the devil’s advocate, take the position no one else would dare make, and in doing so, stand out in a crowd.  In the classroom, the young and the old are pitted against one another, leaving the students somewhat befuddled when it’s clear their methods are starkly at odds with each other. 

There’s a brisk pace to the film, wonderfully expressed with the musical selection of the Cure or The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” as the kids are checking out books from the library, moments that might otherwise be sluggish or forgettable.  A continuing thread throughout the film are gay themes, with Mr. Hector being more open about it than the closeted Mr. Irwin, but also in the portrait of one of the students, Posner (Samuel Barnett), who can’t take his eyes off one of the other students, Dakin (Dominic Cooper), who is something of a hunk, the only student who regularly flaunts his sexual prowess.  One of the best scenes in the entire film is Posner’s heartfelt rendition of the song “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” Bewitched Samuel Barnett -The History BoysOST YouTube (3:12), emphasizing the male attraction in the lyrics, (“l sing to him, each spring to him, and worship the trousers that cling to him”), directing every line towards Dakin.  There’s also a beautiful epilogue segment, cast in a differering hue, portrayed with a kind of afterlife omniscience, as the kids sit around and reveal what careers they chose in their lives.  It’s an especially poignant scene that works only because of the steady build up of shared moments with each student, who are now intimately familiar to us.     

2014 Top Ten List #6 The Selfish Giant

THE SELFISH GIANT            A-           
Great Britain  (91 mi)  2013  d:  Clio Barnard

In Clio Barnard’s extraordinarily original first feature, 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #4 The Arbor (2011), a unique study of the life of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the age of 29, where the film extends the boundaries of documentary filmmaking, becoming a word play based upon actors lip-synching 90 hours of audio interviews Barnard conducted with Dunbar’s family and friends, a haunting and disorienting fusion of fact and fiction extending the artist’s tragic life into the lives of her own children, where Dunbar’s alcoholism gave way to the heroin and crack addiction of her daughter.  The director’s highly unorthodox technique accentuates the artifice of filmmaking, showing the camera and crew, exposing what the audience normally doesn’t see, using fictional methods to unravel the hidden inner truths of the artist.  Barnard grew up in the town of Otley in Yorkshire, just a half hour away from Dunbar’s home of Bradford, where she’d often go ice skating or see musical bands as a child, as her dad was a university lecturer teaching English, mostly the Romantic poets, while her mother was a jazz singer, with her parents separating at age 6, where she grew up with her dad, attending art school at Leeds, Newcastle, and then Scotland, eventually becoming a video artist with installations in art museums around the world with a healthy skepticism about the cinematic misrepresentation of realism.  Now a teacher of film studies at the University of Kent, in her second feature Barnard has embraced the same social realism she critiques so fervently in The Arbor, writing a script inspired by an Oscar Wilde children’s story about a bad-tempered giant that won’t let children play in his idyllic garden, turning it into a perpetual winter, becoming a searingly realistic piece about a young boy named Arbor, where he and his best friend have a falling out, both exploited by an unscrupulous scrap metal dealer, where they are introduced into the harshly brutal working conditions of adults, ostracized and excluded children pushed into the outer fringes of society where something has gone fundamentally wrong, victims of an ever widening gap of economic inequality, forced to endure the horrible dangers of child labor all over again due to an insatiable capitalistic greed that so willingly puts children at risk.

The story is loosely based upon a living reality, through an actual young boy named Matty that Barnard met while shooting The Arbor, as he kept getting into the shot while riding his horse, a scruffy kid wearing dirty clothes that exhibited a kind of “fuck you” attitude against others.  At times he would show up with his friend Michael, both outsiders who survived by any means necessary, where they spent their days scavenging for scrap metal in Bradford, which is one of the thriving businesses in the city, calling into question whether they were being exploited by the scrap merchant or getting an opportunity.   Barnard recalls meeting his mother who told her “What the hell else is he going to do around here?  At least he’s earning some money.”  His continual presence on the movie set eventually turned into the character of Arbor, named after the street where Dunbar lived, showing how life has a common stream–of-conscious thread that connects us all together.  Using two non-professional child actors who are onscreen in nearly every shot, the film is set in an oppressive Dickensian world of poverty, exploring the close friendship that develops between two boys who both come from dysfunctional families, with no working parents and no adult role models, whose families are barely getting by, who are teased and bullied by others who are less marginalized, but these two kids share a common bond of both being outsiders where they at least have each other.  Arbor (Conner Chapman) is the more impulsive of the two, smaller, louder, openly defiant of authority, and emotionally unpredictable, requiring medicine for his hyperactivity, while Swifty (Shaun Thomas) is more an easy going big brother, a kindhearted kid who seems to follow the lead of Arbor, remaining his most loyal friend and protector, even during troubled times.  Their relationship is reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which was similarly set during the economically challenged times of the Great Depression, but here failed industrialism is a remnant of a once thriving past in Bradford, where the economically abandoned town is drained of any possibilities of hope.      

Arbor has violent temper issues, is prone to fighting, and is quickly expelled from school, Swifty, his sidekick, along with him, where Swifty’s parents insist he not be a layabout at home, so they send him to school, despite his expulsion, where he can only spend his days sitting in perpetual detention.  This perfectly expresses how society deals with troubled kids, as they make no attempt to deal with or treat their problems when it’s so much easier to simply rid themselves of the problem altogether, leaving kids on the margins to fend for themselves where they have no resources.  Abandoned by their schools and by their families, few good options await them, and society eventually pays a price.  The one place where they can receive money is the morally dubious scrap iron dealer, Kitten (Sean Gilder), who runs a black market business on the side and becomes the only adult who actually seems to care about these boys, becoming their surrogate guardian, encouraging them to work harder, which is another way of exploiting them for cheap wages, showing them how they can burn away the traces of stolen copper wire, which puts them in ever more precarious situations of having to steal wire right under the noses of working electricians.  While Swifty has some notion of the hazards involved, Arbor is relentlessly fearless, developing a greedy and insatiable appetite for more, showing a daredevil streak that tends to get them both into trouble.  For that reason, Kitten seems to favor Swifty, allowing him to borrow a horse and cart to pick up and carry heavier items, where he doesn’t trust the more hot-headed Arbor, who flies off the handle at any given moment, driving a wedge between them.  One of the illicit activities is harness racing these animals down the auto roadways at dawn, where trucks and cars are driving right alongside the horses with drunken spectators leaning out the windows attempting to influence the outcome of the race, hoping their noise will be a distraction, turning the race into something of a thrilling spectacle.      

Unlike The Arbor, which was shown with subtitles, this film did not, so nearly half the dialogue, despite being spoken in English, is incomprehensible.  This may alter one’s appreciation for the film, as much of the written poetry is lost, but the audience has a feel for the spirit of the language, where illiterate youth and the profoundly uneducated from impoverished communities have a way of wrapping their regional dialogue in slang, gutter talk, and profanity, all of which further alienates them from the mainstream.  One of the most haunting recurring images is seeing how humanity from a dilapidated tenement housing project swells into close proximity to a cluster of five nuclear power smokestacks, as they did in THE RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009) which was also set in Yorkshire.  When Arbor and Swifty get away from it all, they wander into a pastoral green field containing an endless stream of giant electrical transmission towers, inhabitants of a veritable wasteland that extends into the horizon.  These toxic images have a life force all their own, seen as a monstrous looming presence hovering off in the distance, continually threatening to have a major impact.  While the film is about a boyhood friendship that rises out of the depths of poverty and despair, it’s also about loss, where to their mothers these boys are lost children pushed beyond their control, where that feeling of loss permeates over everything that happens by the wrenching finale, which expresses an all consuming despair not seen since the end of Brokeback Mountain (2005), or the melancholic The Sweet Hereafter (1997), where the near wordless images beautifully comment on everything that came before, altering our view of their friendship and the connecting families in the community, providing additional meaning to what feels incomprehensible, where the bleak devastation of dire poverty has rarely been expressed with such poetic eloquence.  The film is about what happens when society ignores cries for help, where the inevitable tragedies that occur will haunt and literally redefine people’s scarred lives.  A remarkably intelligent work of rare insight and daring, shot with visual acuity from cinematographer Mike Eley, Barnard examines the effects of postindustrial England with stark realism, where with utter compassion, and never pity, Barnard literally shames a nation to rediscover its own rich heritage and humanity.    

Short Stories: The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde - East of the Web  complete text of the story

Lad: A Yorkshire Story

LAD:  A YORKSHIRE STORY          B                     

Great Britain  (96 mi)  2013  d:  Dan Hartley     Website   Trailer

Written, directed, produced, and edited by Dan Hartley in his first feature film, working as a video assistant operator on all the Harry Potter films, but born and raised in Yorkshire, making this something of an autobiographical project, where this is a somewhat uneven effort that takes awhile to get going before winning the audience’s favor, becoming something of an uplifting feelgood film of the year by the end.  Easy on the eyes, this is a literal travelogue through the Yorkshire Dales, which are used as more than a backdrop to this film, as the rocky landscape literally becomes the heart and soul of the lead character, Tom (Bretten Lord, a non-professional), a stand-in for the director, a young impressionable child whose headstrong reactions often produce chaos, yet also tug at your heartstrings, as you know the kid has the best of intentions.  What begins as a poor family living on the outskirts of town, far away from everything, yet their backyard is a panoramic vista as far as the eye can see of unspoiled natural landscape, a simply idyllic place to live, but for this family, with a truck driving Dad (Liam Thomas), a grocery clerk mom (Nancy Clarkson), and two young boys, Tom and Nick (Robert Hayes), it’s all they know, where the boys are often seen playing in the splendor of the immense green plateaus.  While Tom is something of a whiny kid that tends to get on everybody’s nerves, he’s also well meaning and earnest, while remaining loyal to a fault.  His world caves in, however, when his Dad suffers a heart attack and dies, made even worse when they don’t have the income to maintain the mortgage payments, so they’re threatened with losing their home.

While the set-up feels like a stock melodrama, and if truth be told, it is, the film slowly overcomes this weak introduction by investing Tom’s playful humor and stubborn, childlike personality into a willful push to save his family.  While it doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that would work (where one might wonder:  Where’s Lassie?), but the winning performance of Bretton Lord is priceless, as he successfully guides this picture into a fairly accurate recollection of childhood, befitting of an S.E. Hinton novel.  When Nick unexpectedly joins the army and leaves home, it feels like the ship is sinking when the bank refuses to grant an extension and intends to take home possession, but Tom’s boisterous antics, borrowing a tractor filled with a load of manure and driving it to the bank and plastering the front door with the entire load, has a way of drawing attention to the local residents.  The police decide, due to the death of his Dad, that rather than harsher punishment, what he really needs to do is some community service, where he’s ordered to help the local ranger, Al (Alan Gibson, another non-professional), a middle-age handyman who’s been at the job already for 17 years.  The special relationship that develops between these two, both of whom couldn’t be more natural souls, is the centerpiece of the film.  Hartley dedicated the film to the real Al Boughen, whose death in 2010 inspired the making of the film.  There are no large, drawnout scenes meant to magnify the experience, but instead becomes a series of smaller, genuine moments where they just talk honestly to one another. 

The film retains its comical balance with Lucy (Molly McGlynn), Al’s granddaughter, a straight talking tomboy a few years older than Tom who’s used to using her wits, where she continually flusters and outsmarts Tom, who’s simply befuddled by her presence.  Largely to get away from her, he turns to Al for refuge, where the two become fast friends, with Al becoming the father figure that Tom missed.  It’s a tender, quietly affecting story that accumulates depth and humanity over time, as Al is an intelligently reserved, no-nonsense guy who’s been to war and back, but doesn’t open up easily himself.  Lucy gets plenty of screen time and becomes less unnerving, while Tom’s mother has a bit of growing up to do as well, as she has to literally charm her way into a new job, using all the intimidation tactics she can muster.  It’s an interesting mix of comedy, landscape portraits, coming-of-age adventure story, and heartfelt moments that all combine to provide an authentic portrait of the region, using people from the community who had never acted before.  The film is something of a memory piece that pays an inspirational tribute to growing up in the region, capturing the spectacular scenery of the national park, but also the role rangers play in protecting and preserving the natural beauty, most of which goes unseen.  Young Tom becomes an authentic voice from the region, like a young Huck Finn living along the Mississippi riverbank, whose heart and soul become affected by the circumstances that define who he is on his journey to adulthood. 

Sightseers

SIGHTSEERS             B+  
Great Britain  (89 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Ben Wheatley              Official site

Perhaps taking a cue from memorably camp material like The Honeymoon Killers (1969), Wheatley turns the conventional travelogue vacation movie on its ear, though it’s perhaps undone by the sheer unlikeability of the main couple.  Sad sack Tina (Alice Lowe) lives with her manipulative and overcontrolling mother, Carol (Eileen Davies), a somewhat mean and grotesque figure still grieving over the loss of their pet dog Poppy who died a year ago.  Tina is a licensed but pathetically inept dog psychologist who seems to instead sympathize with her mother’s grief.  Given the opportunity to temporarily escape her sheltered environment with Mum, she jumps at the chance to go on a road adventure with her new boyfriend, aspiring writer Chris (Steve Oram), driving a live-in caravan behind them on a meticulously planned trip through Northern England’s Yorkshire territory.  Somehow the ultra-hilarious Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden’s impressionist extravaganza The Trip (2010) comes to mind, but this film builds its cleverness on the sheer conventionality of the two characters that haven’t a notable distinguishing characteristic between them.  Happy to be on their way, to the sound of Soft Cell :Tainted Love Music Video - YouTube  (2:39), though assaulted by a series of miserablist phone calls from Mum who feigns dire emergencies like Bud Cort feigned suicides in HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971), Tina has to spread her wings and let go, finally free of the mad clutches of her mother.  All seems to be going well until Chris becomes overwrought at the callous actions of an unconcerned litterbug at a world heritage site, going on an extended rage until he accidentally runs over the poor guy with his caravan, where blood spurts out from his neck like a cheap B-movie special effect, accentuating the ridiculousness of the act, but also the worthlessness of the litterbug’s life.        

Not to be deterred, the couple won’t allow a regrettable man’s death to ruin their vacation, developing a common mindset where they can do whatever they please, like this brief clip where they pass a larger caravan, getting downright giddy over the idea, Sightseers "Dingly Dell" Clip - YouTube (1:11).  As they get deeper into the countryside where the undulating hills dominate the landscape, they park their caravan in close proximity to another couple who have an identical dog as Poppy, where the guy is something of a smug writer, bragging about having written three books, while the girl refuses to allow her dog to be fed junk food.  Chris immediately hones in on their detestable nature, arising at the crack of dawn for his neighbor’s scheduled walkabout, following them into an excluded area before bashing him over the head with a rock, then pulling his pants down to make it look like a sex crime to throw off the authorities.  Grabbing the dog as their own, Tina is overjoyed at the sight, instantly calling Banjo by his rightful name (in her eyes), Poppy.  Taking great pleasure at watching the TV news reports of the crime, Chris is thrilled when it’s reported that the police are on the lookout for a perverted sex criminal.  Tina has an inkling of what Chris has done and develops a theory, by eradicating detestable individuals from the earth’s population, you are in fact elevating the potential gene pool, an idea that suggests selective murder is a Green activity, perhaps enhanced by the trippy version of Season of the witch - Vanilla Fudge - YouTube (8:47), suggesting something mind-altering is in the midst.  So rather than be repulsed by the hideousness of the act, Tina finds herself sexually aroused like never before, where one might even say these are the happiest days of her life.  Off they go on their cross-country journey, where Tina discovers if she doesn’t really like someone, for whatever reason, she has a partner willing to do something about it, willing to go all the way to set things straight, which gives her a feeling of invincibility, like this clip where she grows delirious with her newly discovered power, literally toying with the idea of what her boyfriend will do, Sightseers - "National Trust" Clip YouTube (1:53)

The director’s third feature, this is the first he did not write himself, relying instead upon the two lead actors, a TV writing and acting team, along with longtime collaborator Amy Jump.  The film doesn’t seem to suffer from this lack of input, and while it’s basically a series of funny sight and sound gags, there’s not much else, lacking the depth and insight to be much more, yet it’s hands down one of the funniest films of the year.  The film takes a single idea and runs with it, where the musical selections throughout are outstanding, including the exquisite JULIE DRISCOLL ft BRIAN AUGER - season of the witch ... - YouTube  (7:57), offering a twist midway through, as Tina grows so newly empowered that she starts knocking people off with relish, everytime she gets irritated, something that draws the ire of Chris, who believes there’s a selective art to killing, especially murdering Green, so they can’t just pick off random anybodies.  If they’re going to commit themselves to killing thoroughly detestable people, then they must elevate their standards to only the truly despicable.  Other dark serial killer movies go to great lengths to establish character, like Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison (1968), where her surprising amoral zealousness steals the picture, where even Bobcat Goldthwait’s disturbingly bizarre satire God Bless America (2011) uses a similar premise of blowing away only the most irritating people on the planet.  In comparison, this is more understated, with few cinematic tricks up its sleeve, but one with a unique premise that continually pays off.  While the two leads are forgettable, the kind of people you’d walk right by on the street without a second thought, we learn little about them except they’re tired of living under the thumb of rude, overbearing authority figures, where they fantasize about taking matters into their own hands.  Tina grows out of control, where female empowerment never looked so good, as Chris can’t hide the bodies fast enough, where he’s constantly chiding her lack of ethics when it comes to serial killing.  Something of an English holiday from Hell, visiting tourist sites few would ever think to actually visit, like the Crich Tramway Village, the Blue John Cavern, the Keswick Pencil Museum, or the picturesque Ribblehead Viaduct, before finally reaching a mountainous destination by the end, where there always seems to be a steep ledge making it ever so convenient to push an unsuspecting body into the waiting darkness.  Entertaining, to say the least, and darkly sarcastic, where Chris justifies one of his killings with “He's not a person, he's a Daily Mail reader,” finally drowned out by the sounds of GLORIA JONES- "TAINTED LOVE" (1964) - YouTube (2:14). 

Wuthering Heights (Arnold)

WUTHERING HEIGHTS                    B-                   

Great Britain  (129 mi)  2011  d:  Andrea Arnold

While revisionist works are always controversial, this one is a flawed misstep, reverential in tone as a visual essay of a literary work, where the words are lost in an incomprehensible mix of bad acting and mumbled sound recording.  Throughout this mostly wordless film, very few words can actually be understood, instead relegated to background noise, which seems to be by design as the director’s intent.  Arnold is known for using non-professional actors, but that appears to go awry in this version, as the actors are simply incapable of generating any interest towards any of the characters, all of whom are mere sketches of mostly unpleasant people.  The same criticism was levied against the original novel, that the story was unlikeable and the 18th century characters unpleasant.  While the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë was published in the mid-19th century, this film version feels more like the Middle Ages of Chaucer, especially since language is all but obscured, which heightens the graphic brutality on display, including continual mistreatment of animals, where people are seen as little more than wretched and contemptible people.  Within this setting, where nature abounds, they are literally surrounded by a near idyllic pastoral landscape of verdant rolling hills in the Yorkshire moors, a place where human evolution lags behind, as despite the pristine, Edenesque beauty, humans are little more than grotesque animals on the loose, matched by the constant presence of continually barking dogs.  The opening hour of this film is largely an abstract visual essay, a mosaic of constantly shifting patterns of darkness and light, where the stunning compositional beauty of the cinematography by Robbie Ryan is painterly, much like a Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) landscape, like “Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Background” (1,016 × 768 pixels), an English landscape style that pre-dates the Impressionists.  Shot in a boxed 1:33 aspect ratio literally saturated in a claustrophobic, arthouse style, everything layered in a sensuous glaze, the experimental style initially feels highly inventive, but after awhile the style itself grows repetitive, especially when the mind’s eye of a child grows into an adult and the surrounding world looks exactly the same, unchanging and still uncompromising.    

While there are at least 15 different versions of this story on film, making it one of the most popular movie adaptations of a novel, the most famous is the William Wyler version with Laurence Olivier from 1939, an overly stiff costume drama suffocating in Gothic period atmosphere, where reality is nowhere to be seen in that production.  Given Andrea Arnold’s penchant for social realism, she literally turns the genre form upside down and reshapes this into an experimental film, using handheld cameras and a pervasive use of the natural countryside, almost always engulfed in low-lying fog, not to mention endless wind and rain, becoming not just melancholy but overwhelmingly dreary.  Arnold makes a few significant alterations, changing class differences to racial inequity, casting Solomon Glave, a young black actor as Heathcliff, who is an abandoned boy, perhaps a runaway slave found roaming the streets of Liverpool, taken in by the Earnshaw family as part of their Christian duty and raised as one of their own, much to the utter contempt of eldest son Hindley (Lee Shaw), who continually makes abusive and disparaging racial taunts (“He ain’t my brother, he’s a nigger”), but is loved openly by the only daughter Catherine (Shannon Beer).  The two are seen forever roaming the hillsides together where their playfulness leads to budding sexual feelings.  When her father dies unexpectedly and Hindley takes over the farm, Heathcliff is immediately treated as a servant, banished to sleeping in the barn, unable to eat or socialize with the family.  The film is seen completely through the eyes of Heathcliff, often peering around the corners of buildings, behind a hedge, looking into a window, all in search for Catherine, where he becomes obsessed by her every move.  Hindley’s temper often gets the better of him, where he can be seen punching and kicking Heathcliffe, all for minor infractions, becoming more explicitly racial, calling him a “nigger” and a thief, giving him a brutal whipping, continually showing him his place, where he’s not one of the accepted family members.  Still, Heathcliff seems to hang around for a chance to see Catherine, though when he actually utters something, it feels crude, horribly insulting, and completely out of place.  When Catherine decides to marry a local boy, Edgar (Jonny Powell), a rich neighbor, Heathcliff quietly disappears in the pouring rain. 

A significant period of time passes, as Heathcliff (James Howson) has elevated his class status and returns a wealthy man, but Catherine is still married.  This doesn’t prevent continual visits, where they return to the open wild of the hilly countryside, also mixed in with flashback sequences of when they were younger.  For all practical purposes, Catherine (Kaya Scodelario) is the lady of the house now, complete with servants waiting on her, where her rendezvous visits out on the moors with Heathcliff have scandal written all over it.  Older actors assume their roles, but they fail to convey any of the sense of exuberance or naturalness of the younger actors, lacking deep affection or the brooding gravitas needed, where Heathcliff is more of a stalker than a lover, and despite his elevated class status, there is little that can be done, as she has married into wealth and a life of comfort and ease.  Danger, however, surrounds their every move, as no good can come of it.  The more Heathcliff insists on staying, the more their lives are doomed, destroying everyone around them.  Initially in his return, Heathcliff was driven purely by revenge to get back at Hindley, whose life has spiraled into drunken chaos and debt, a shell of his former self, hardly worth thinking about.  Purists will scoff at Heathcliffe’s use of profane gutter language, though mostly he says nothing, where at some point Catherine actually realizes, “You never have anything to say,” to which he responds, “That never bothered you before.”  Brontë followers will likely be offended by Arnold’s choice to make a near wordless film of a literary masterpiece, and if the spontaneity of young actors had succeeded, perhaps this might have been a boldly exciting, quasi punk experiment in power and passion.  But instead the audience feels cheated by the lackluster performances, feeling emotionally empty, where despite the overwhelming brilliance of the style, this is an overly bleak and completely unengaging adaptation, a missed opportunity, an unrelenting trek into abject misery and pain.  Often adding visual metaphors of birds stuck in cages, moth’s fluttering at a closed windowsill, or insects caught in a spider’s web, animals are as plentiful onscreen as humans, but with each species, we are unable to decipher interior ideas or emotions, where the complexity of the novel has been completely transformed into what becomes by the end an exhausting visual abstraction, a descent into human degradation.