Jane Eyre (2011)

Rochester: Then the essential things are the same. Be my wife.
Jane Eyre: You have a wife. 
~from Jane Eyre (2011)

I have seen so many film versions of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel Jane Eyre that I was going to skip the 2011 one. However, some friends recommended it highly; I gave in. I think I cried more while watching it than I have in any of the past  productions. Does that mean I enjoyed it? Why yes, yes it does. Mia Wasikowska is just as I picture Jane in the book: prim, plain and restrained with an inner serenity and sensitivity that glow from within, bestowing a beauty unlooked for. Similarly, I thought that Michael Fassbender had the right blend of wildness and self-loathing to be the Mr. Rochester who captures Jane's heart and mind.

I find myself agreeing with The New York Times review:

This “Jane Eyre,” energetically directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) from a smart, trim script by Moira Buffini (“Tamara Drewe”), is a splendid example of how to tackle the daunting duty of turning a beloved work of classic literature into a movie. Neither a radical updating nor a stiff exercise in middlebrow cultural respectability, Mr. Fukunaga’s film tells its venerable tale with lively vigor and an astute sense of emotional detail.

The director does not exactly make the task look easy, but the wild and misty moors, thanks to the painterly eye of the cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, certainly look beautiful, and Dario Marianelli’s music strikes all the right chords of dread, tenderness and longing. Brontë’s themes and moods — the modulations of terror and wit, the matter-of-fact recitation of events giving way to feverish breathlessness — are carefully preserved, though her narrative has been somewhat scrambled.

The opening scene shows Jane in desperate flight from Thornfield Hall, dashing across the stormy landscape as if pursued by demons and menaced by a ghostly, wind-borne voice. She is taken in and nursed back to health by a young clergyman, St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell), and his two sisters (Holliday Grainger and Tamzin Merchant); then her earlier life unfolds in a series of flashbacks that compress many pages into a few potent scenes and images.

Despised by the aunt in whose care she has landed and abused by her cousins and the servants, Jane (played as a child by Amelia Clarkson) nonetheless manages to cultivate her innate decency and bolster it with self-reliance. And the movie audience, like the 19th-century novel-reading public, can relish, with only slight queasiness, the sadomasochistic spectacle of boarding school cruelty.

There is something voluptuous in the rage inspired by the kind of meanness we are used to calling Dickensian. The oppressors are so awful, the oppressed so innocent, that the desire to see justice done becomes an almost physical hunger. And as in Dickens, the brutality and dogmatic moral arrogance of Jane’s righteous oppressors at the Lowood school have a political dimension, one compounded by Brontë’s clearsighted feminism.

Ms. Buffini’s script, while it trims and winnows some of Brontë’s empurpled passages, preserves important elements of the author’s language, including, above all, Jane’s repeated invocations of freedom as an ethical and personal ideal. Freedom in “Jane Eyre” is a complicated theme in its own right — on the Internet you can buy several term papers that explore it — and also a word whose value and meaning change over time. For the Jane in this movie, it means the ability to act without external constraint and to think without fear or hypocrisy. (Read more.)

It is pleasantly surprising that Jane Eyre is still as popular as it. Everything about the story contradicts our modern outlook. A young woman renounces wealth and deep passion in order to do the right thing which, in Jane's case, is refusing to commit adultery. In this she is upholding the law of God at great cost to herself. The 2011 version celebrates her sacrifice amid breathtaking scenery even as the music drowns the viewer in her pain. There are few films that do justice to the books upon which they are based; the 2011 Jane Eyre is an exception, and honors the masterpiece of Charlotte Brontë.

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