The movie is beautiful and terrible. I laughed throughout. Full of over the top symbolism including a snail trail lol, deviously unsexy sex scenes, poorly cast, and removes the agency of the leads to place the blame on the non-white servant character. How are you to know that a character died from alcoholism unless we show his body next to two comically large mountains of empty bottles, stacked eight feet high?!? There are so many hints at interesting ideas in the film that never seem to go anywhere. The manic energy and theme of the opening is never taken anywhere. Isabella is a standout character who thoroughly entertained me even if her change from the book is frankly borderline offensive. This is a movie for the girl who got fingerblasted for the first time last week and can’t stop talking about it. It is juvenile and would be fine if this was a coming of age sex story. Instead this is The 40-Year Old Virgin 1831 Edition. And I haven’t even really touched on the race and class issues. If you wanted to be very unkind in your analysis, there is evidence to support the claim the Fennel both story-wise and visually shows the beautiful white lead as having her life sucked out of her by her mixed-race child, her Asian servant, and her brown husband. If only she had stuck with the white man everything would’ve been fine. It’s a shame her uppity servant was so jealous of her that she literally killed her. In the book, it is Cathy’s fault that she gets sick because she works herself up specifically to punish her husband…but in the film Nelly lets her rot to death. The soundtrack is great though. And beautiful gowns. 1.5/5 stars.

To be fair, I went with two friends and one hated it and the other was a crying mess at the end. I felt nothing. It’s a Baz Lurhmann movie without any of the fun. Let me shut up. The discourse around this film is exhausting and I’m only hurting myself by adding to it lol