Yesterday evening my mother and I saw this film at the Old Mill Playhouse in the Villages.
I'd noticed that it was being well reviewed (82% on the vaunted Tomato Meter) and so decided I needed to give it a try..
Because I am just such a complete sucker for period dramas based on classics, you know. Especially romances.. I'm a sensitive pseudo-sophisticate quasi-literate new age deeply in touch with his X chromosome type of guy, is what I'm saying.
From every version ever made of Les Liaisons Dangereuses to anything by Merchant Ivory – I snort it all like coke. E.M. Forrester to Jane Austen, The Four Feathers and Brideshead Revisited to The Scarlet Pimpernel..
It's all great to me. A well made film with women in bonnets and corsets is simply not to be missed.
But the odd thing is I can't remember ever seeing Jane Eyre before.. This is especially odd, because the novel has been made into a movie or TV mini-series over 20 times this last century. It is in other words a staple BBC, Merchant Ivory, A&E type classic, that along with the likes of Jane Austen, just keeps being recycled by filmmakers.
So, oddly enough, despite this burning passion of mine for period pieces, I don't think I've ever seen a single one of them.. I just googled the title, and there's apparently even been a well received version made in 1996 by Zefferelli, starring Charlotte Gainesbourg – a favorite French actress of mine, acting in this film in English – and William Hurt.. Her French accent is apparently close enough, if you're an Italian director working for an American audience..
Anyhow, I've read the novel once, long ago in high school. I remember liking it quite a lot, but that it was rather long. I'd much preferred it to Wuthering Heights which I also read once back then, but did not like it as much as say Pride & Predjudice.. (But then is there any novel that I like as much as Pride & Predjudice, other than maybe Emma? Err, no.)
I've never since re-read it, because the size of the book and the residual sensation of the story's heaviness have kept putting me off. I've picked it up a few times, hefted it, thumbed a few pages, and always then put it down to run back to reading Aunt Jane yet again, for (now literally) the 20th or 30th something time.
So, I walked into the theater tonight utterly free & clear, not remembering any details of the story beyond the fact that Jane Eyre was a governess who falls in love with her employer.. Actually, I also remembered the very end of the tale, which I won't divulge here.
Other than that though, it was a revelation, and a terrific one. Despite not having read the book in 20 years, I think I can still say with some confidence that this is one of the best adaptations of a novel I've ever seen.
Three things were especially superb:
First, and maybe most importantly, the casting is spot on.
Mia Wasikowska does her now customarily excellent (see the very good The Kids Are Alright and mostly mediocre apart from her fine performance Alice in Wonderland) work as Jane Eyre.
Jane is supposed to be plain looking (as is the lead male character, Edward Rochester) but rent with integrity and passion that causes many people she encounters to respond viscerally in either hate or love for her. Most particularly, the two main male characters Edward and St. John Rivers, both fall hard for her in their own very different ways.
So the casting here is key – Jane has to be plain but compelling. Mia Wasikowska is perfect, because she is exactly that. Her face is usually impassive, with her eyes emoting everything. She's not made up at all here, and her features – while regular and pretty – are not classically beautiful. She's like a tuning fork in her scenes, in that she vibrates emotion that emanates and fills the screen and audience. She's awesome, in other words, and while the rest of the cast (which includes Judi Densch) is also excellent and apt to their parts, she pretty much carries the film herself.
Second, while the visual pallet of the movie is mostly very dark, it is exactly apposite to the mood of the story. The landscape depicted (the moors of northern England) is exquisite, and seems almost sentient.
Third, while (as I've already said) I haven't read the book in ages, my mother (who has read it many times) says that the abridgment necessary to make such a long novel with all its interwoven subplots and dozens of characters into a two hour movie was both effective and very faithful to the original story.
It's a major pet peeve of mine when filmmakers take significant liberties with a story I love. If they do it egregiously enough it ruins the movie for me. This abridgment focuses on the central love story (as it had to) and had me completely fascinated from nearly the beginning.
A few more incidental observations:
The film has a magical realist vibe to it. I won't give much detail as to how this works, but suffice to say that it in some places it felt a bit like a supernatural suspense or even horror movie, in that the tone and mood are gothic and baroquely romantic, occasionally verging on the excessive. It's not clear what's happening in a few places, if you don't already know the story (and again, I didn't) the motives of the characters can occasionally seem opaque and mildly fantastic. Once everything becomes clear, it all makes sense though. If Bronte herself had been advising the filmmakers, I imagine she would have been very pleased with result.
So I really appreciated the how the film dealt with spirituality. Most of the characters are fervent 19th century low church English Calvinists, cousins to Scotch Presbyterians, and this is portrayed in what I felt is a rich and fair manner. There are a few cruel and judgmental bigots of the type that sometimes give Christianity a bad name, and then many others who I thought are depicted living their their faith in a normal, or sympathetic even admirable way. There is also quite a bit of folk mysticism in the film, where it's clear that the characters see the world in what many people today would call magical terms. They believe there are spirits and unseen forces about, and they are always interacting with and effecting what is seen.. I liked this a lot, because I've encountered this type of culture in places myself, and it charms and seduces me. This spirituality helps give the film its lyrical and romantic air.
I also was struck how the landscape and physical context – which includes technology – effects culture, spirituality and religious worldview- the moors are stark and forbidding, which clearly impacts how the people there see the world. Everywhere I go lately, I notice this same effect: the material imbues the culture.
I've been thinking how things that we today take for granted, such as mass literacy (a result of modern publishing due the printing press and now internet, as well as universal schooling that accompanied industrialization just over 100 years ago) or mass produced clothes (made by ginned cotton or other industrially made cloth, and machine sewn to universal patterns – and which now everyone, even the comparatively poor can usually afford many sets of, as well as now have the ability to launder them well and often) – deeply effected, and in effect created the class hierarchies that used to exist.
To have good quality, clean clothes was much more expensive, and so rarer then. Having them was an automatic class marker. So too was literacy (a high quality education is what clearly marks Jane Eyre off from the common class in this story) more unusual – because books and paper and writing instruments were all rarer and more expensive, then..
This story, like Jane Austen's work, is obsessed with social status and the role of women in 19th Century English society. The heroine is an intrepid and sympathetic girl, who seeks her happiness and freedom through her relationships. Like Austen's heroines, she is a gentlewoman, in that she is educated and from an upper middle class, minor gentry background, but because of the death of her parents is thrown upon the mercies of others and eventually has to become a governess to support herself.
She's much like Jane Fairfax in Austen's Emma, in other words. Accomplished, very intelligent, and of a good family background, but forced by her circumstances to work teaching children. This how she ends up meeting Edward Rochester. He becomes her employer, but because she is by birth also a gentlewoman, he can socialize with her in a way that he could not with a lower servant.
This gives the story much deeper pathos than anything by Austen. All of Jane Austen's main female characters are of more secure economic circumstances. Even the Bennet sisters in Pride & Prejudice would have had enough of an income to live lives of genteel poverty without the need to work themselves, had they all failed to find husbands. Furthermore, only one of the Bennet sisters needed to land a rich husband for the rest of them to be all financially well off.
Jane Eyre would be destitute without her work. Unlike all of Austen's central female characters, she is also a servant. This gives her story a tragic dimension and a heightened desperation, her character being much more in need of both money and emotional outlet, as well as other sorts of consummation and freedom.
The fact that there was in normal circumstances no divorce in 1840's England, and that marriage was much more serious affair then, is also important here.
It really fascinates and amuses me that modern women swoon so much for these stories, in which the most obvious (perhaps only clear) means that the women in them can truly fulfill themselves is by binding themselves to men of property and power. Jane Eyre is particularly egregious in this, because as I say, Jane becomes utterly abject before her employer Edward Rochester, withholding only her integrity from him, which is exactly what makes him utterly fall for her.
He's rude and brusque, deliberately promenading another (rich and more beautiful) woman before her, and not hiding that he had apparently had a child by an affair (which he could not have hidden, since the child was her charge as governess). He very clearly is attracted to her almost immediately, and does not hide this despite her being both his employee as well as her being about 20 years younger than he is. He comes and goes as he pleases, treats her rudely, and then occasionally shows her any kindness and attention.
But he is a furnace of desire. That he so clearly wants Jane works like catnip to her inner kitten.
She very naturally falls deeply and insanely in love with him, and.. Well, I won't give any major spoilers here. Watch the film, you'll see. The point is that for the better part of the story she does very little other than be coy and insist that he respect her. It's pretty clear to him though that despite her attempt at maintaining sang froid that her sang is actually quite chaud. Until the very nearly the end of the film, he senses this and pursues her, and so is the protagonist in their relationship, while until the very end she more or less just reacts to him.
Demure, principled, but also passionately charged: the perfect feminine vibe.
I mean, to be utterly clear, I dug it all too. I only mention it as it just doesn't really jibe with the feminist narrative of women wanting to behave actively in romantic situations like men.
Here's my take on it all: I think these stories show how male and female desire are symbiotic to the point that they are compatible theses to one another: women are attracted by desire, by being desired. Female desire is incited by being the object of desire, but in a tantalizing and authoritative way. Male desire exhibited with confidence, elan and self-possession – that's the thing.
Male desire is simpler on the face of it, but in the end still fickle. I'll simply say (again, without giving much away as spoiler) that there are three other romantic relationships than his one with Jane that Edward Rochester has in the film – one with an unseen but reputedly beautiful yet capricious French actress who had been mother to Jane's charge, and another with a beautiful rich girl who is invited to the manor, who exhibits a disdain for Jane. The third relationship is even more over the top than the others (this is a Victorian Gothic romance, after all..) It is very clear to me why he prefers the demure and passionate yet scrupulously principled, as well as kind and generous (which is to say extremely feminine and nurturing) Jane to them all.
I'll also re-emphasize in closing that the restraints that 19th century Victorian society placed on married people very clearly made love and eros a very serious thing. Theirs was the diametric opposite of our modern pick-up and divorce ridden culture. I personally admire them theirs, and despise ours. Give me their mores, give me their moral, emotional and spiritual seriousness. This freedom we have is trite and boring.
Anyhow, the upshot is that this is a truly excellent movie, one that I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend.
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