Cinema 2011 #85: Jane Eyre

Cary Fukunaga, the Hollywood Wunderkind best known for his 2009 breakthrough with the central American family drama Sin Nombre, here adapts Charlotte Brontë’s paean to plain girls everywhere, lending Jane Eyre a distinctly handsome feel. The production, starring two of contemporary cinema’s ones to watch with Mia Wasikowska as the titular governess and ubiquitous Irishman Michael Fassbender as the roguish Mr. Rochester, is a beautifully crafted period drama, with a fine eye for detail and costume, and more moors than Heathcliff could hope to mope around.

But for all its finery, there is an undeniable lack of dramatic tension to proceedings. The stewing romance between Jane, a mousy waif whose keen intellect belies a life of strict educational reform courtesy of a hard-hearted aunt (Sally Hawkins, playing keenly against type), and Rochester gets suddenly thrust upon the audience without so much as a coy smile or hanky’s wave. In their place, we get some supposedly pithy banter that mostly feels like two adults, a misanthropic bastard and a petticoated outcast who clings to her sense of ordinariness like some sort of spite-driven shield to fight off would-be naysayers, who suddenly decide one day that they both enjoy hating everybody else, so why not spend the rest of their days despising the dolts around them together? 

He was pretty picky about who he let touch the cherry blossom

Of course, true love never runs quite so smoothly, and a well-known plot twist may just scupper these scorn-filled sweethearts on the path to hate-fuelled happiness. Along the way, however, are some fine performances to enjoy.

Wasikowska, showing Anne Hathaway how to actually sound northern and making up for her disasterious turn as proto girl-power zigazig ha-ing Alice in Burton’s boring billion dollar Wonderland, makes for a beguiling Jane Eyre, obviously too pretty (every leading actress is too pretty, and dull brown hair doesn’t solve that), but with a believable intelligence bubbling under the surface. Fassbender, working the mutton chops and period garb, is just perhaps a tad too dull as Rochester, though ennui is a particularly difficult emotion to display without causing the audience to feel the same.

Dame Judi Dench, as the sweet-natured housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax, is in cracking Cranford mode, but Jamie Bell, as the Rev. St. John Rivers, a young curate who rescues Jane in the opening scene, comes off as crabby and cross, and not quite right for the part.

The problems feel more linked to Moira Buffini’s plodding script and Fukunaga’s laboured direction, a sullen stiffness rather than under the surface lust. Add to this a 120-minute running time, and the style overtakes the substance.

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Released Nationwide: Sept 9th

Runtime: 121 mins

Certificate: 12A