The name “Wuthering Heights” always conjured up strange dark passions and not necessarily those belonging to Heathcliff. Imagine the Bronte sisters–dreaming of romance and, for Emily, dying only a year after she published her only novel. She was 30. The 2011 British drama could only have rated a withering stare of disgust. Director Andrea Arnold has made a pallid, flat and faded version of this melodrama. The movie was listed as playing on the official website in Pasadena, but will not be coming to the Pasadena Playhouse 7. Don’t bother journeying down to Los Angeles to view this film.

This 2011 movie is not the dreams of a sexually frustrated woman suffering the winter time blues under the often dark skies of the Yorkshire landscape. When I was living in South Yorkshire as a graduate student, the winters made me think that I could understand what drove the spinster Brontë sisters to gothic imaginings. The movie takes us to a remote moorland farmhouse. “Wuthering Heights” is the name of this farmhouse, but to wuther means to blow with a dull roaring sound according to Merriam-Webster.

The story was controversial in its time. The basic story is about Catherine Earnshaw (Kaya Scodelario with Shannon Beer as the younger version) whose father (Paul Hilton) finds an orphan and takes him home, naming him Heathcliff (Solomon Glave as young Heathcliff and James Howson as the mature man). Mr. Earnshaw has a son already, Hindley (Lee Shaw). Hindley isn’t pleased with his new “brother.” When Mr. Earnshaw dies, Hindley treats Heathcliff like a servant instead of family. Catherine meets with the Linton family and becomes more socially conscious. Eventually, she rejects her feelings for Heathcliff and marries Edgar Linton, a man she doesn’t love but will provide her with a higher social status.

Heathcliff leaves and returns two years later, a wealthy man who takes advantage of Hindley’s debts and eventually buys Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff elopes with Edgar’s sister and they marry.  Both Catherine and Hindley die, leaving an embittered Heathcliff determined to have his son to marry Catherine’s daughter, also Catherine, but usually called Cathy.

The 1939 American movie starred Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff while Merle Oberon played the much loved Catherine. David Niven portrayed the man Catherine married, Edgar Linton. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, the movie won for Best Cinematography, Black and White.  The script in this movie doesn’t include the Catherine’s daughter or Heathcliff’s son.

The 2011 version casts a black man as Heathcliff. According to reports, Arnold originally hopes to find an actor from the Romani community but then looked into mixed race Asian or Middle Eastern. The novel describes Healthcliff:

“He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose.”

While the idea is refreshing, the movie itself is dull. The colors of the Yorkshire moors are subdued. The rain produces mud but not the deep verdant greens, the bright mosses of the Yorkshire. Likewise the passions are subdued to the point of being unrecognizable as obsession or a great love.

The chemistry between the actors who play Heathcliff or Catherine is flat. The camera is shaky, as if handheld, at times. There’s a quality of informality, like a home movie. Arnold doesn’t romanticize the farm life and the principal photography was taken in North Yorkshire. There is mud and dirt. Catherine and Heathcliff are scruffy and rough at first. But too much time is spent in tedious shots showing scenery or faces and that doesn’t push the movie forward.

Yet where is the passion that would bring a wealthy man back from wherever he went to where he had a bitter family life? Instead of a tormented love triangle, we get a torturous movie going experience.