If she fulfills the promise she shows here - and in "The Piano" - she is going to be an actress of great authority and instinct.Īlso good in the early scenes: Fiona Shaw as Jane's awful aunt John Wood as Mr. Paquin holds the screen with quiet, compelling style. She's strong and smart and extraordinarily wizened about the true nature of the world. Oscar-winner Anna Paquin ("The Piano") is excellent as the young Jane. Unfortunately, there is a horrible secret lurking (more or less literally) in the attic. Rochester's remote Thornfield Hall, Jane soon falls for her mysterious employer. Following her graduation, she is hired to be governess to a young French miss who may or may not be the illegitimate daughter of the rich and brooding Mr. It never soars or swoons.įor those who missed the book (or any of the previous cinematic or TV adaptations of it): "Jane Eyre" tells the story of a plain-faced but strong-minded orphan who is dispatched to a horrible "charity" school by a cruel aunt. But as engrossing as it is in certain scenes, it lacks romantic electricity. (CNN) - "Jane Eyre" is a solid retelling of the gothic classic by Charlotte Bronte. 12, 1996 Zeffirelli's 'Jane Eyre:' a semi-classic If this Jane Eyre ended on a settled note, there’d be no need for the next.CNN - Zeffirelli's 'Jane Eyre:' a semi-classic - Apr. But the film’s ambiguous ending seems curiously appropriate to its status as the latest in a long line of adaptations. As in the novel, Rochester’s temperament is so mercurial that he effectively functions for stretches as the story’s villain, a never-quite-resolved tension that works better on the page than onscreen. Rather than brooding heavily in the style of Orson Welles or William Hurt, he plays the character as a maddening quick-change artist: one minute he’s solicitous and tender, the next sarcastic and cutting. Here he makes for a transfixing, if curiously unreadable, romantic hero. But if Fassbender took the low road and chose to make a career as the thinking woman’s literary dreamboat, I wouldn’t complain. Michael Fassbender ( Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds) has chops enough to pursue any role he wants (his Basterds character, an English film critic turned David Nivenesque spy, was one of the best things in that movie). This Jane Eyre is as lucid and matter-of-fact as a film can be whose story hinges on brooding gentlemen with secrets and muffled screams from the attic. The cinematography by Adriano Goldman recalls the look of Jane Campion’s Bright Star, another literary love story that incorporated nature not just as a pretty backdrop but as a thematic element here, the lead couple’s volatile relationship seems inextricably tied to the changing landscape around them. Though all the story elements are in place for a thunder-on-the-moors-style gloomfest (and though there are, in fact, several thunderstorms on moors), this film is low on Romantic atmospherics and flooded with natural light. She’s not “a little toad,” as one uncharitable character calls Jane in the early pages of the novel, but she’s no plum-lipped Keira Knightley either.įukunaga’s vision of Jane Eyre is refreshingly un-Gothic. But makeupless and unsmiling, her hair coiled in a low, middle-parted bun, Wasikowska has the severe gaze of an early photograph. Wasikowska’s wispy, ethereal beauty at first makes this seem like a poor choice, given that Jane’s much-mentioned “plainness” figures importantly in the plot. Now, Cary Joji Fukunaga, the young director of the immigration drama Sin Nombre, has chosen 20-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska ( Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right) as his Jane.
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