His mad wife is still beautiful and vibrantly sexual (delivered in one scene by Valentina Cervi)-as if they might have a relationship still. His actions are capricious and cruel-as when he flirts with Blanche Ingram in front of Jane (only to admit that he finds Miss Ingram a nonentity).
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Michael Fassbender’s Rochester lets these indulgent faults stare from his handsome but depressed face. This has promoted a sexual adventuring that has Adele as a “ward” (or an unacknowledged and neglected daughter), and which is ready to make Jane the unwitting partner in a demented, bigamous marriage-or retain her as a mistress who is expected to be amenable because she is poorer than he is. He is a self-pitying idiot who uses his misfortune at being compelled to marry a mad woman (a lost soul who would be redeemed in 1966 by Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea) as an excuse for wretched behavior.
Rochester, let’s face it, is an unwholesome Byronic hero (that is the generous label pinned on him in literary history). The novel was a landmark in nineteenth-century feminism, but it is legitimate to recognize that, over 160 years later, the audience wants to see the battle of two uncommon minds. It is a story of reason, kindness, and character overcoming madness and class attitudes.
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This is sensible, for the movie means to concentrate on the bond between the neurotic Rochester and the sane Miss Eyre. Thereafter, it shows her being rescued by the Rivers family and passes quickly over her grim childhood. Her work is frequently faithful to Bronte in the matter of dialogue-edited down yet retaining the drama of the novel and the essence of its language-but it has a movie-like opening with Jane’s desperate departure from Mr. As such, its virtues start in the script by Moira Buffini (she did Tamara Drewe for Stephen Frears). More important, it’s a modern movie about a fraudulent man and an honest woman-types that persist. This is the best version of Jane Eyre I have ever seen, and if you have dismal memories of Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles (1943), or William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg (1996), you should immediately track this version down on a big screen.īut it’s not enough to say only that this is the best translation of a classic. So I neglected the picture when it opened, but was stirred into action by my wife, Lucy Gray, who told me it was wonderful.
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There have been too many film adaptations of the Charlotte Bronte novel (published in 1847), and some of us have wearied of keeping up with them all. Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre opened over a month ago, but it’s staying in theaters and word-of-mouth is building.