Jane Eyre (2011)
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
After a bleak childhood, Jane Eyre goes out into the world to become a governess. As she lives happily in her new position at Thornfield Hall, she meets the dark, cold, and abrupt master of the house, Edward Rochester. Jane and her employer grow close in friendship and she soon finds herself falling in love with him. Happiness seems to have found Jane at last, but could Rochester's terrible secret be about to destroy it forever?
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20 films that influenced Jane Eyre
What critics say influenced Jane Eyre
In some of these sequences, “Jane Eyre” recalls another gothic romance, Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” in which Joan Fontaine plays the bewildered, fragile child-bride of Laurence Olivier.
And it includes the elements that have enlivened stories from “Rebecca” to “Dark Shadows.”
This Brontë celebration was accompanied by Hitchcock's classic treatment of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's homage to Jane Eyre, starring Joan Fontaine as an unnamed narrator, and we tend to conflate her two performances in our mind.
That woman with the braids on her head, struggling to walk through lashing rain, falling in the mud, determinedly fleeing we don’t know what – in the dramatic opening of Cary Joji Fukunaga’s new film, she could be any fiery 19th century heroine, from Tess of the D’Urbervilles to Cathy in Wuthering Heights.
The problem with Jane Eyre has always been that Jane and Rochester are thrown together by narrative contrivance rather than by inevitability - Charlotte's sister Emily did a far better job of presenting a convincing relationship between two people who just don't make any sense together with her Wuthering Heights.
The story includes elements of the Gothic hauntings of a Mary Shelley (Frankenstein); the engaging war of wits of a Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice); and the super-charged romantic melodrama of Brontë sister Emily (Wuthering Heights).
Films of Brontë novels have been arriving in pairs at regular intervals these past 70 years, as if a production of Emily's Wuthering Heights demanded an accompanying production of Charlotte's Jane Eyre .
It stands in relation to the original the way Amy Heckerling's Beverly Hills comedy Clueless does to Jane Austen's Emma.
If this Jane Eyre, in the wake of at least 20 earlier movie versions, doesn't fully sustain this spirit of reinventing the Brontë story (it can't match the boldness with which Jane Campion recalibrated The Portrait of a Lady for the 1990s), there are sufficient rewards to engage a viewer who hasn't encountered this quintessential Victorian, death-steeped romance since sophomore English, principally the two leads and their duet of Byronic morbidity and virginal fluster.
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There was also at that time Jacques Tourneur's remarkable horror film I Walked With a Zombie (1943), a transposition of Jane Eyre to the modern Caribbean where the Rochester character's mad wife becomes a victim of voodoo.
If you don't count I Walked With a Zombie, this is the 27th screen adaptation of Brontë's classic, the mother of all Gothic romances.
It stands in relation to the original the way Amy Heckerling's Beverly Hills comedy Clueless does to Jane Austen's Emma.
It's as if all the updates, satires and reappropriations of various Empire romances didn't exist: Never mind that Jean Rhys refigured "Jane Eyre" as a post-Colonial critique in the 1966 novel "Wide Sargasso Sea," or that Amy Heckerling transformed Jane Austen 's "Emma" into the teen-flick "Clueless," or that the popular "Twilight" novels have inspired an improbable literary subgenre with titles like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and "Jane Slayre."
From the 1944 Joan Fontaine-Orson Welles film to the 1996 version directed by Franco Zeffirelli, nearly every feature-length "Jane Eyre" has had to wrestle with the challenge of condensing Bronte's episodic narrative, a task more easily managed by five-hour-plus adaptations such as the beloved 1983 miniseries.
The cast is fine: Judi Dench, Jamie Bell ("Billy Elliott," many years ago) and Michael Fassbender from "Inglourious Basterds" as the imperious, worldly Mr. Rochester.
Same with Fassbender, who’s had something of a cult following since 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds,” but had yet to strike a chord for me.
Mia Wasikowska (" Alice in Wonderland ") is the orphaned but uncomplaining Jane, who becomes governess to a little girl under the care of the wealthy, wretched Edward Rochester (a convincingly intense Michael Fassbender , "Inglourious Basterds").
Unfortunately, as Rochester, the master of the manor, Michael Fassbender ("Inglourious Basterds," "Hunger") fails to match Wasikowska's ability to sink into character so deeply and completely, leaving us spellbound by her majestic bearing despite her poverty.
Fassbender, whose recent appearances include Fish Tank and Inglourious Basterds , continues a display of impressive range.
Now BBC Films is adding a fourth theatrical version to the list, and though director Cary Fukunaga (previous feature: Sin Nombre) and stars Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right) and Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Centurion) are hardly household names, it might well be the best of the lot.
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Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre’’ is both wilder and more muted, and in tone and pacing it most closely resembles 2009’s “Bright Star.’’
The cinematography by Adriano Goldman recalls the look of Jane Campion's Bright Star, another literary love story that incorporated nature not just as a pretty backdrop but as a thematic element; here, the lead couple's volatile relationship seems inextricably tied to the changing landscape around them.
Back before there was a "Twilight" or even a Stephenie Meyer, there were the Brontë sisters, who wrote stirring romances that would strike the fancy of doe-eyed young girls with stories about fiercely independent women resistant to the urges of love but eventually finding seemingly perfect men.
Charlotte's Bronte's Jane Eyre is among the greatest of gothic novels, a page turner of such startling power, it leaves its pale latter-day imitators like Twilight flopping for air like a stranded fish.
Diehard "Twilight" fans looking for a deeper, darker romantic mystery would do well to check it out.
As the prototypical tale of a pale gothic heroine caught up in an unconsummated passion, the new Jane Eyre well appeals to the Twilight generation.
Even as it romanticizes agony, Fukunagas Jane Eyre plays as a correction to the Twilight seriesin which a teenage girl idolizes mystically powerful boysarguing that love, in its perfect state, is a meeting between equals.
It's as if all the updates, satires and reappropriations of various Empire romances didn't exist: Never mind that Jean Rhys refigured "Jane Eyre" as a post-Colonial critique in the 1966 novel "Wide Sargasso Sea," or that Amy Heckerling transformed Jane Austen 's "Emma" into the teen-flick "Clueless," or that the popular "Twilight" novels have inspired an improbable literary subgenre with titles like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and "Jane Slayre."