“Jane Eyre” is to celluloid what Romeo and Juliet is to theatre — not in terms of a love story, but as a text that is returned to, repeatedly, over the years. In both stories, the richness of the narrative allows them to be relevant to the tastes of the times. When I think of how current flavours favour repressed desire and dark secrets, it's hard not to see a resonance between “Twilight”'s Bella and Edward, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane and Edward.
There have been more than 20 versions of “Jane Eyre” as film and TV series. It has been made into Mexican soap operas, and inspired films in places as varied as Hong Kong and Italy. And, India — “Sangdil” (1952) starring Dilip Kumar and Madhubala was a loose adaptation of the story. So persuasive is the text, there is at least one website — The Enthusiast's Guide to Jane Eyre Adaptations — dedicated to recording every possible detail of the novel's journey through other media, including parodies such as the musical “Jane Eyre: Decomposed”.
None definitive
Over the years, famous people have played Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester including Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles (1944). Many versions such as Jane's outing on the big screen in 1996, when Franco Zeffirelli directed Charlotte Gainsbourg, were very well-received. Yet, while there have been great Janes who have worked the gamut of personas from mousy to passionate, there hasn't really been the one definitive Jane, the way Vivien Leigh nailed Scarlett O'Hara. Perhaps, that is why “Jane Eyre” can be remade without huge outcries from the fans.
If “Jane Eyre”, the novel represents a curious amalgamation of genres from moral fable to gothic thriller to romance, its heroine is equally unusual. Famously described as plain, her appeal stems from her fiery sense of self. Often called a proto-feminist novel, “Jane Eyre” boasts of a heroine who seeks the freedom to be herself despite the cruel demands of her time to conform.
In the best sense, the 2011 adaptation feels extraordinarily close to this tenor of the 1847 novel. And yet, the film is definitely contemporary, if only judging by the multiple ethnicities of the talents that have come together to make it: Cary Joji Fukunaga, an American director with a Japanese father and Swedish mother; Australian actor Mia Wasikowska who has a Polish mother; and not forgetting Michael Fassbender, a German-born Irish actor.
Fukunaga's film is gorgeously produced from music and sets to costumes and visuals. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman creates painterly frames — brooding landscapes and cleverly-lit interiors — in muted greens and beiges and greys; and Moira Buffini does a great job with the script.
A scriptwriter for “Jane Eyre”? That sounds like a mistake; the text is so famous, you forget other writers are needed to enable its transition from paper to celluloid. Among the more unusual folks who have tackled the script is the unlikely line-up of John Houseman, Aldous Huxley, Henry Koster and Robert Stevenson, credited as scriptwriters of the 1944 version.
A dramatic start
As for the 2011 version, Buffini creates a properly dramatic beginning for the film with Jane's flight from a place of personal safety but moral danger, across the bleak moors, to an unknown future. Most of the story unfolds as flashbacks that allow for some smart cinematic ellipses. Much is left out to get quickly to the crux of the story: Jane's arrival in Thornfield Hall, her relationships with the various inhabitants, and most significantly her romantic entanglement with Lord Rochester (Michael Fassbender).
Wasikowska is a great Jane for our times — moral but not saintly; not egoistic, but not servile either; and possessing a tremendous ability to reinvent herself and grow. Though she suffers, she is never a victim; and rises to be a woman who is greater than the sum of her experiences. Fassbender is a cleverly-conceived Rochester with just the right touch of Byronic gloom — not so over-the-top that he would seem to belong to another era of filmmaking.
Yet, paradoxically, one criticism of the film is to wish for more smoulder overall. The 2011-version plays it very straight, and for the most part that works very well, but a soupcon more of the Gothic would have gone down rather well in this revisited classic.
Classics have a way of being timeless, and of course, cyclical. Apart from “Jane Eyre” this year, we also have a remake of a book by another Bronte sister. “Wuthering Heights 2011” is an interesting concoction directed by acclaimed English director Andrea Arnold; among other honours, she has won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film (for Wasp, in 2005). Her update of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel stars, for the first time, a black actor (James Howson) as the menacing hero Heathcliff.
And lastly, last heard, Baz Luhrmann is filming an update of “The Great Gatsby”, replacing Robert Redford — if that were possible — with Leonardo DiCaprio. This really doesn't have my vote, but who knows, the director who revamped the Bard's love story with “Romeo+Juliet”, might yet pull off a great Gatsby.
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CELLULOID CENTURY
Jane Eyre (1910) — Irma Taylor, Frank Crane
Jane Eyre (1914) — Ethel Grandin, Irving Cummings
Jane Eyre (1915) — Louise Vale, Alan Hale
Woman and Wife (1918) — Alice Brady, Elliot Dexter
Jane Eyre (1921) — Mabel Ballin, Norman Trevor
Jane Eyre (1944) — Joan Fontaine, Orson Welles
Jane Eyre (1949) — Mary Sinclair, Charlton Heston
Jane Eyre (1961) — Sally Ann Howes, Zachary Scott
Jane Eyre (1963) — Ann Bell, Richard Leech
Jane Eyre (1970) — Susannah York, George C. Scott
Jane Eyre (1973) — Sorcha Cusack, Michael Jayston
Jane Eyre (1983) — Zelah Clarke, Timothy Dalton
Jane Eyre (1996) — Charlotte Gainsbourg, William Hurt
Jane Eyre (1997) — Samantha Morton, Ciaran Hinds
Jane Eyre (2006) — Ruth Wilson, Toby Stephens
Jane Eyre (2011) — Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender
