Yes, Brady and Cavanagh are too old for the childhood scenes, but no version has ever cast real twelve-year-old for those parts (The Calder-Marshall/Dalton one skipped to the adult actors ASAP and so did the Binoche/Fiennes one, if you'll recall), and I'll be very surprised if one ever does. The crucial dramatic scenes are from ages 12-16, which means you'd have to cast two or more actors for each role (Cicely Tyson could age 10-110 believably, but most actors can't) if you want to show the changes of adolescence. Most name actors wouldn't tolerate just playing the scenes post-marriage to Edgar, and leaving the meatier adolescent scenes to child actors. And frankly, most younger actors couldn't handle the dramatic weight of those scenes--possibly a young Kirsten Dunst could have carried the role of teen Cathy, maybe River Phoenix teen Heathcliff, but what about those accents? Now this may change someday: just as real teens were once thought unable to play Romeo and Juliet and since the Zeffirelli version casting young has become the norm, there may come a production that changes our view of WH forever and we will be unable to imagine non-teen actors playing those scenes.
That said, however, this version captured the characters as written better than any I have ever seen. Heathcliff was not romantically sugar-coated to make him less ruthless and vengeful than he is, Edgar for once is not portrayed as a wussy little weakling but just an ordinary, civilized guy who doesn't have a clue what a messed-up situation he's getting into with these local savages. Maybe Cathy 2 is a little more sympathetic than she was in the book (she starts out pretty shallow and class-conscious there), but Cathy 1 is as hysterical, self-destructive, and borderline as Bronte meant her to be, and her ill-fated decision to marry Edgar is clearly not just social-climbing or (as she says) an attempt to get power to help Heathcliff, but a misguided notion that if she surrounds herself with comparatively normal people like the Lintons, she'll stop being the permanently-damaged product of a family "dysfunctional" doesn't even begin to describe. Maybe Nelly's a little whitewashed: in the book she meddles when she ought to leave things alone and leaves them alone when she ought to take action, but the actress does a good job as the one rational person following the progress of this Dysfunctional Family Tree. Kudos to all the actors, and to the scriptwriters for not making the Lintons the villains so we can have more sympathy for Cathy and Heathcliff. The Lintons have the values of their time and class, but they don't deserve to be #$%^ed over as horribly as they are just because they're too prosaic to understand Cathy and Heathcliff's supernatural bond.
I loved the scene with the cave--where a young Cathy gets a glimpse of the man Heathcliff will grow to be, and the dying Heathcliff repeats the vision at the end. Even though it wasn't in the book, it captures the eerie sense that there was something extraordinary going on behind those ordinary events of bad marriages and class conflict, something supernatural and fated.
BTW, this is the first version I've seen where all the principals actually have Yorkshire accents. Maybe the Lintons wouldn't, since they have London connections and Joseph even claims he can't understand Isabella's dialect, but Heathcliff, Cathy, and Hindley would all have them, not just the servants like Joseph. This is before mass communication, and they wouldn't have heard many non-local people speaking, the way city-kids from Leeds or Liverpool might. Even today when everybody has TV and radio, the accent in Haworth is very strong, so even though they toned it down for the sake of comprehension, at least they sounded like they grew up in North Country and not in a classroom at RADA.
That said, however, this version captured the characters as written better than any I have ever seen. Heathcliff was not romantically sugar-coated to make him less ruthless and vengeful than he is, Edgar for once is not portrayed as a wussy little weakling but just an ordinary, civilized guy who doesn't have a clue what a messed-up situation he's getting into with these local savages. Maybe Cathy 2 is a little more sympathetic than she was in the book (she starts out pretty shallow and class-conscious there), but Cathy 1 is as hysterical, self-destructive, and borderline as Bronte meant her to be, and her ill-fated decision to marry Edgar is clearly not just social-climbing or (as she says) an attempt to get power to help Heathcliff, but a misguided notion that if she surrounds herself with comparatively normal people like the Lintons, she'll stop being the permanently-damaged product of a family "dysfunctional" doesn't even begin to describe. Maybe Nelly's a little whitewashed: in the book she meddles when she ought to leave things alone and leaves them alone when she ought to take action, but the actress does a good job as the one rational person following the progress of this Dysfunctional Family Tree. Kudos to all the actors, and to the scriptwriters for not making the Lintons the villains so we can have more sympathy for Cathy and Heathcliff. The Lintons have the values of their time and class, but they don't deserve to be #$%^ed over as horribly as they are just because they're too prosaic to understand Cathy and Heathcliff's supernatural bond.
I loved the scene with the cave--where a young Cathy gets a glimpse of the man Heathcliff will grow to be, and the dying Heathcliff repeats the vision at the end. Even though it wasn't in the book, it captures the eerie sense that there was something extraordinary going on behind those ordinary events of bad marriages and class conflict, something supernatural and fated.
BTW, this is the first version I've seen where all the principals actually have Yorkshire accents. Maybe the Lintons wouldn't, since they have London connections and Joseph even claims he can't understand Isabella's dialect, but Heathcliff, Cathy, and Hindley would all have them, not just the servants like Joseph. This is before mass communication, and they wouldn't have heard many non-local people speaking, the way city-kids from Leeds or Liverpool might. Even today when everybody has TV and radio, the accent in Haworth is very strong, so even though they toned it down for the sake of comprehension, at least they sounded like they grew up in North Country and not in a classroom at RADA.