Jane Eyre

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Jane Eyre

UK 2011                      121 minutes

Director:                      Cary Fukunaga

Starring:                        Mia Wasilowska, Michael Fassbinder, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell and Sally Hopkins

 Nominations and Awards

• One nomination for Best Actress (Mia Wasilowska) in the British Independent Film Awards

“Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is among the greatest of gothic novels, a page turner of such startling power, it leaves its pale latter-day imitators like Twilight flopping for air like a stranded fish.  To be sure, the dark hero of the story, Rochester, is not a vampire, but that's only a technicality. The tension in the genre is often generated by a virginal girl's attraction to a dangerous man. The more pitiful and helpless the heroine the better, but she must also be proud and virtuous, brave and idealistic. Her attraction to the ominous hero must be based on pity, not fear; he must deserve her idealism.  This atmospheric new Jane Eyre, the latest of many adaptations, understands those qualities, and also the very architecture and landscape that embody the gothic notion.”

Roger Ebert

Jane Eyre (Mia Wasilowska) arrives at the home of St John Rivers (Jamie Bell) after fleeing from Thornfield Hall, the home of Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbinder) who had engaged her as governess his young “ward” Adele and then proposed marriage on false pretences.  St John Rivers proposes marriage and a future as a Christian missionary, but subsequent events allow Jane to return to Thornfield and her true love.

Charlotte Bronte’s novel has been filmed many times with the 1944 version (from a script by Aldous Huxley) starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in the lead roles is the best known.  The book has also inspired many other writers including Daphne du Maurier whose novel Rebecca (also filmed with Joan Fontaine) uses the same character types that Roger Ebert has notes in the quotation above.   Jean Rhys has an even closer connection with Charlotte Bronte as her novel Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Edward Rochester’s marriage to his first wife in the Caribbean.  The novel was also the inspiration for The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, which involved a cunning plot by international villains using a prose portal to break into the novel and kidnap Jane Eyre and hold her to ransom....   

                                                                                                      

The screenplay for this new version is by the playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini, who also wrote the screenplay for Tamara Drewe based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.  Cary Fukunaga made his name with the American/Mexican film Sin Nombre (2009) for which he won the best director award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. 

Here's the trailer: