Season 39 - Wuthering Heights (2009)
The thing about Wuthering Heights is I always really want to like it but never do. I've seen more adaptations than I can count all hoping that one would strike a cord in me. I chased down old productions for actors I liked just in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, having say, Matthew Macfadyen in it would improve it. He did not. Hell, he didn't even speak as far as I can remember. In fact the introduction on that old VHS tape from the library was more interesting than the production itself. Thank you Russell Baker for explaining exactly why I hated the Laurence Olivier one so much! Most of the novel was cast aside in favor of a "happy" ending for the 1939 film. Yes. They tried to make Wuthering Heights have a happy ending! The mind boggles. Therefore I didn't have much hope for this new version staring that guy who was good in The Virgin Queen, that guy from The Walking Dead and Love Actually (a film I detest), and Owen from Torchwood. And yes, this is exactly how I categorized it in my head. Well, my lack of expectations led me, late one Sunday night, to find the first version of Wuthering Heights I enjoyed. No, enjoyed is too milquetoast, I was enraptured by it. Yes, it has a grim beginning with Tom Hardy as Heathcliff disinterring Catherine's skeleton while wearing a really bad wig, Tom, not the skeleton. But as I'm sure everyone else who's seen Tom Hardy act will agree, there's just something so magnetic about him, you can't look away. He became Heathcliff. What's more, Charlotte Riley was so perfectly cast as Catherine that she and Tom fell in love. You can feel their attraction through the screen. This is real. This is emotional. This is what Catherine and Heathcliff should always be. That heat, that passion, that tragedy. Thankfully in real life they are living a happily ever after and Tom isn't out back digging a grave where he will later cradle her corpse. But this didn't just become my all time favorite Wuthering Heights adaptation, if forever made me fans of Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, who while perfection in this, are even better in Taboo and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell respectively.
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