The American Spectator : Jane Eyre

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Jane Eyre

By James Bowman on 4.6.11 @ 6:03AM

How does this beautiful adaptation compare to the great novel?

Movies, we sometimes have to remind ourselves, are a pre-eminently visual medium, and this always means that there are certain things they can do better than others. These things come into sharper focus when someone tries to translate a work of literary fiction into cinematic terms -- as someone has tried to do with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre more than twenty times since the procedure became possible a century or so ago. The latest to try is Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), working from a script by Moira Buffini. The two of them, together with director of photography Adriano Goldman, have created a strikingly beautiful film. The question remains, however, as to whether or not it is visual beauty that is wanted when it comes to Jane Eyre, whose eponymous heroine is unambiguously described as "plain," so we must suppose, for a reason.

I have read some critics who have tried to make the case for the literal plainness of Mr. Fukunaga's Jane, who is Mia Wasikowska (The Kids Are All Right), but I don't believe that any unbiased observer will be persuaded. Miss Wasikowska is small and boyish of figure -- she would do very well for one of those Shakespearean heroines who dress up as boys -- but she is very far from being plain. On the contrary, she is as beautiful as the magnificent Peak District landscapes of Derbyshire that Charlotte Brontë herself apparently wished to substitute for the less picturesque moors of her native West Yorkshire and that Mr. Goldman lays on with glorious excess, one after another, in between a series of warm and evocative candle- and hearth-lit interiors. Even at her most downtrodden and miserable, this is a Jane that you can't take your eyes off.

Fifteen years ago -- can it really have been so long? -- Franco Zeffirelli tried to get around this problem by casting Charlotte Gainsbourg in the role. Miss Gainsbourg was even less conventionally pretty than Miss Wasikowska, but she was equally attractive and so equally tended to push this classic story of inward beauty's triumph over the outward kind in the direction of, if not all the way to, incoherence. There, too, there was the problem of William Hurt's idiosyncratic and new agey Rochester, the mystery man who employs her as a governess before improbably falling in love with her. Mr. Fukunaga's Michael Fassbender does a much more persuasive job with the role, even if he is as unfortunately trapped by the logic of the cinema as his predecessor and his co-star.

That logic is simply too hostile to the idea of finding goodness in the unattractive -- or perhaps I mean attractiveness in mere goodness -- without the spice of visual beauty. Mr. Fukunaga is required by the same logic to make his bad characters, who are Jane's oppressors, very unattractive indeed. Even Sally Hawkins, so attractive in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, is well and truly uglied up as Jane's horrid Aunt Reed. This personage is equally awful in the novel, but Lowood School, to which Aunt Reed sends Jane to get rid of her, is not. On the contrary, it is only Mr. Brocklehurst who is the seriously bad guy in the novel. The rest of the staff there, and particularly the head teacher Miss Temple, are much more sympathetic to Jane, and Miss Temple becomes a beloved mentor. Mr. Brocklehurst (Simon McBurney) is a shadowy figure in the film and I thought Miss Temple missing altogether -- as she was in the Robert Stevenson-Orson Welles version of 1943) -- until I saw that she was listed in the cast as having been played by Edwina Elek. Certainly, she was nothing like the Miss Temple of the novel.

My guess is that audiences today prefer the "Dickensian" imagery of unrelieved adult cruelty to children in stories of Victorian scholarship -- perhaps in order to persuade themselves that the permissive approach to education which has superseded it, whatever its shortcomings, must still be superior. We also prefer that religion, which is always in the mouths of the bad people and the justification of the school's tyranny over Jane, should be presented as an unmitigated evil, even though in the novel it is explicitly Christian forbearance and virtue that get Jane through her difficult childhood and youth. But the anti-religious biases of the movie business presumably have less to do with the logic of the cinema than with merely adventitious cultural imperatives. Given the centrality of religious belief both to the novel and to its original audience, its marginalization here cannot be a trivial flaw, even if it is very nearly an inevitable one. Rare, indeed, is it anymore to see a film -- like the truly exceptional Of Gods and Men -- where religion is presented even somewhat sympathetically let alone with genuine understanding.

Thus, too, in Mr. Fukunaga's and Miss Buffini's Jane Eyre, the love for the heroine of the parson and would-be missionary St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell) is not treated with the respect it gets from Miss Brontë. In fact, the novel ends with Jane's solicitude for the long absent and still unmarried St. John whose missionary labors among the heathen in India are likely soon to be the death of him. In the movie, he comes off as being little better than a creep and a stalker, in spite of his kindnesses to Jane. Dame Judi Dench does a characteristically creditable job as Mrs. Fairfax, Mr. Rochester's housekeeper, but the other minor characters, including Bessie (Jayne Wisener), Aunt Reed's sympathetic housemaid, Grace Poole (Rosie Cavaliero), and even Helen Burns (Freya Parks), Jane's poor, doomed school-fellow, a role played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1943 version, fail to make much of an impression. The nine-year-old version of Jane as played by Amelia Clarkson is good enough that we must regret how little chance she is given to give us the child's perspective on the adult world that has always been such a memorable feature of the novel.

But I would not be like Miss Scatcherd, who is said in the novel to have eyes that gaze on the few spots to be found on "the disc of the clearest planet" and "can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb." All this is to qualify the positive impression that the film still contrives to make in spite of its simplifications and its both more and less forced superficiality. In its favor, we must cite the beauty aforementioned and a rather clever use of flashback in telling Jane's story beginning in medias res that is also very cinematic. As the novel's sense of friction between outward appearance and inward reality doesn't really show up on film, the film-makers have substituted for it an implied friction between past and present, between the Victorianism (as we have learned to think of it in a pejorative sense) of Jane's unfortunate and oppressive background and upbringing and the more up-to-date individualism that, in historical fact, actually sprung out of the romantic Victorian world-view but that, a century and three quarters later, we have come to take for granted.

In the novel, when Jane returns to Mr. Rochester it is because the mystical ties of sympathy between them which allows Jane to hear what seems to her his cry for help when she is on the point of accepting St. John's proposal. That would never do for Mr. Fukunaga, who instead has her make up her mind to defy convention and agree (as she thinks) to live as his mistress when she has definitively rejected St. John. Instead of ending with the latter's heroic mission to the "Hindostanee" idol worshippers like the novel, the movie ends with Jane's remarking to Rochester on the dreamlike quality their reunion and his reassuring her: "Awaken, then." Instead of himself coming to see "the hand of God in my doom," as he does in the novel, Rochester now only has eyes, if still vacant ones, for Jane.

Charlotte Brontë herself could hardly deny that the story was essentially the love story of Jane and Rochester, but much of the interest of her novel today lies in the social and economic, moral and intellectual circumstances out of which that story arose and which made it possible. About these things not just this film but all films these days are very nearly clueless. That's what makes me a bit more regretful for what is lost than appreciative of all that is gained from this very beautiful Jane Eyre.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (14) | Leave a comment

Dan Collins| 4.6.11 @ 6:54AM

As compared with the points about religion and the divergent representations of other characters in the novel, Jane's beauty is really not much of an impediment to the message of the film. As a technique that borders on self-parody sometimes, as truly great as the novel is, Jane is always inserting her praises in other people's mouths, to make her more attractive than her modesty permits.

It is true that Rochester has to lose his outward sight, and his manse, in order to gain the insight that convinces him finally to take the proper attitude toward Jane. I don't know whether Charlotte was actually as punctilious about the law at the time she sets her novel in as Emily was in hers, but the conveniently tragic episode of Bertha's self-immolation really is nicely anticipated in the novel.

The term "Gothic" as applied to literature is often derided, but here we have an example of what it can mean as a portion of the Romantic vision. The structural elements of the Gothic cathedral are all moved to the outside--the flying buttresses and such--so as to create on the inside the miraculous impression that the vaulting is impossibly suspended in the air. In other words, it is at large a metaphor for the importance of "interiority" or spirituality over the physical. We have the same thing in Hugo's Notre Dame, with its grotesque hunchback, an exterior gargoyle brought to life to inhabit the hidden recesses of the cathedral. As you say, the Dickensian gothic Charlotte Bronte mostly applies to the spiritual condition of her various nemeses. A cynic might call it "projection."

In "Turn of the Screw," James posits, in modern fashion, the opposition of the natural and the supernatural, bringing both explanations to bear with equal force through his (unreliable?) narrator. The Brontes, by contrast, interpose the "preternatural" as a term mediating between the two, and permitting communication between the supersensual and sensual realms. That, as you say, is a very religious point of view, a view that states in effect that the author's providence is a reflection of God's Providence.

It's a pity that that's thrown over, but I'm assuming that at least the costumes are nice.

Appleby| 4.6.11 @ 7:37AM

Since nobody reads Victorian novels these days with any understanding of their context, and since it became axiomatic in the Sixties that all young women MUST be sexy, beautiful, long-legged and perfect (and willing to have sex with anybody they find attractive), Hollywood should just stop trying to make movies out of any book written before 1964. Nobody out there has a clue what they are talking about.

I refused to take the boys to see Disneys version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and got them to read the book instead. After finishing it, Zack asked, *Why didnt they make a movie out of this?* I told them, because they thought you were too stupid to understand this or pay attention to it without dancing and singing animals added in.

PJ| 4.6.11 @ 8:53AM

Sincere religiosity as interpreted by Hollywood is always spoken by the "bad people." For instance the "...justification of the school's tyranny over Jane, should be presented as an unmitigated evil, even though in the novel it is explicitly Christian forbearance...."

As a general rule, I do not watch today's Hollywood movies that are based upon older novels with Christian overtones. Those in the Hollywood environment obviously are not well-educated in pre-1960 literature nor in that culture. They maybe able to accurately depict the setting but each character's nuance is beyond them.

I have yet to see a recent (w/in 20 yrs) Shakespeare movie produced by Hollywood. Hollywood is generally good for action, violence, slapstick humor, & sometimes good dialog.

Deb| 4.6.11 @ 9:06AM

I disliked the version with William Hurt. However, the 1983 TV serial staring Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton is quite good. When Rochester tries to get Jane to stay by saying he would have no one to comfort him, she says, "Look to God and to yourself."

D| 4.6.11 @ 9:15AM

The closest I have come to liking any adaptation of Jane Eyre was having Orson Wells play Rochester.

Read the book, preferably at least three or four times, and skip the movies.

scythe| 4.6.11 @ 9:27AM

How many versions of this incredible book have been made? Five? Six already? Nothing made compares to the original with Orson Welles and the luminous Olivia de Havilland. When the movie was made, the times were more circumspect and traditional. The film was more faithful to the theme of the story and managed to capture the atmospherics and remain true to the times portrayed. The two principle characters in this latest version don't even APPEAR to represent those created by Charlotte Bronte. Who cast this? Read the last paragraph of the story where it was written that Rochester regained some of his vision after the devastating fire which took his sight and which called Jane, through their mystical bond, to hear his cry of pain and sorrow. He regained his sight so that when she placed their first born son in his arms he could see that the child had inherited his father's eyes, large and BROWN. The ending of the story is achingly exquisite and the words are evocative and memorable. The detail of eye color might seem insignificant, but for fans of this story, it is decidedly not. To ignore this important detail in the casting of the character did not go down well with this devotee. And that's just for starters.

NaturalBorn Texican| 4.6.11 @ 9:31AM

One of my most favorite movies is the newest version of "Pride and Prejudice" that was released several years ago. (Kiera Knightly and Matthew ? -forgot his last name).

The movie is so beautiful. All the angst of star crossed lovers without the vulgarities, nuditity, and the f-bomb being continually being dropped.

When ever I loose faith in humanity and feel unloved, I plug in my DVD of Pride and Prejudice and am lifted to higher, purer, and more honest times. Sure there was illicet sex back then, too. But it was private. (EMPHASIS ON PRIVATE)

I am weary of women who think they have to display themselves, showing every possible inch of skin, with their boobs pushed up under their chins and their butts hanging out of their dresses /shorts, their faces stretched over their bones so tight that they don't DARE to smile......etc.etc.etc....

Love has been corrupted into a sexual act only.

I feel sorry for them....such empty, meaningless lives....... so sad..........

NaturalBorn Texican| 4.6.11 @ 9:32AM

I hope this new remake of Jane Eyre will stand up to the highest standards.......

scythe| 4.6.11 @ 9:33AM

Correction: Meant to write Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre. Although sisters, Olivia de Havilland did not play Jane.

D| 4.6.11 @ 9:34AM

Scythe -- It was Joan Fontaine, not Olivia de Haviland (resl-life sisters, by the way)

Cpm| 4.6.11 @ 11:25AM

Would that Bowman had been this tough on Cedar Rapids.

Dee See| 4.7.11 @ 12:18AM

AS the fallout from Fukishima hasn't even
begun to peak --and perceptions are 'managed',
yet another Jane Eyre retread.

Maybe we'll check it out when we're in town
next wee as we seek a good long term luekemia
and cancer insurance policy ---for our kids!

Creative Recreation| 8.10.11 @ 10:48PM

is good

Georgia Xanthopoulou| 1.6.12 @ 2:02PM

The 15year old me would have never guessed that the 25year old me would actually be interested in watching a film adaptation of such a canonical English novel as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. For one, I was never interested in that kind of literature, since I couldn’t really connect to it. Secondly, from previous experience, costume dramas and BBC adaptations always used to tire me to bits. But, that’s how University can change your life forever. It’s not the people you meet, or the things you learn. It can somehow hack into you and mess around with your taste… And values.

So, even though it was totally unexpected but I was intrigued when I watched the trailer for the 2011 adaptation of Jane Eyre, directed by Cary Fukunaga and adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini. Needless to say, I was comparing the film to the book even as I was watching the trailer. It is quite inevitable to watch a film based on such a well-known novel (which I hadn’t read until the age of 21) and not compare the two. I have to admit I was never one to judge how a well a work of literature is adapted for the big screen, since, usually, the films are the ones which urge me to read the books they are based on and not the other way round. Moreover, I find that one who is a fan of the book will never be completely satisfied with an adaptation, especially when it comes to books held to such high standard as this one is. And that’s simply because, the ways of communicating the same story and emotion differ greatly between the two media and the experience of reading a book cannot be substituted with that of watching a film. And vice versa. That’s why I watched the film being aware of the themes in the book that contributed to its status as timeless and wanted to see how the film treats them. The two themes that I felt had to be communicated was feminism, and the Gothic. Overall, I was happy. Mostly.
Brontë’s Jane definitely comes across as a very strong-minded woman, with the perfect moral character, who moves forward with dignity and that’s why, in the end, she finds happiness. She is plain but somehow charming, says what she feels and is completely honest, strict but kind. Casting Mia Wasikowska was an excellent choice, as she interprets Jane really convincingly. Wasikowska gives a very strong performance of the title character, as she manages to capture Jane’s composed and cool exterior as well as communicate her inner troubles. Her penetrative gaze, courage and respectful way of always speaking her mind are elements to be found in Wasikowska’s performance, aided by a script which does justice to the original character of Jane Eyre, as the dialogue conveys Jane’s quintessential qualities as well.
On from feminism to the other element which, I felt, made Brontë’s original to stand out. That is how well the gothic theme was blended into all the realist elements and descriptions of the book. Even more, how it managed to communicate Jane’s turmoil while still rendering her character as real and grounded as possible. The film not only takes on those notions of the gothic, with its creepy woods and moors around Rochester’s estate, the howling of the wind and, of course, the secret kept in the attic of the house, but accents them as well. The film score frightens and builds up tension, the cinematography uses form and light in order to conceal and suggest, rather than reveal and shock. This results in creating a mysterious, slightly creepy but intriguing atmosphere which, in its turn, provides the perfect backdrop for the blossoming, culmination and troubles of Jane and Rochester’s romance.
And this is where I remembered the book a bit differently. In the book, the romantic subplot was an important one, but only to the extent where it showed how much Jane accomplishes in the end for being the person that she is. The film adaptation, expectedly, plays the romance up just a notch, as it is mandatory for any Hollywood film. Admittedly, it got me as well. The film makes you root for the two of them to get together while the music and the use of landscape frames beautifully the experience of the impossibility of their romance and their release of emotions when they get together. However, the book did seem to use their union in order to highlight Jane’s happiness and success in getting what she wanted and deserved to. As the book is told through Jane’s perspective and is characterized as a biographical document, it is Jane that the readers sympathize with. The film, even though revolving around Jane, by the end seems to adopt a more neutral approach as the viewers are asked to sympathize not only with Jane’s yearning of Rochester (a very interesting interpretation of the character by Michael Fassbender) but with his utter unhappiness without her as well. Seems like the Gothic romance genre continues to excite and inspire, beating the costume (melo)drama-sometimes with very pleasing results.