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.
