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?
