Reviews For the 1944 Version:
The story takes place in England, during the 19th century. Jane Eyre (Fontaine) is orphaned at a young age. Raised in a dismal charity school, her only friend is Helen (Elizabeth Taylor, in a very early role). She is bullied by obsessive puritan headmaster Brocklehurst (Henry Daniell, whom you might recognize from "The Great Dictator"). Coming of age, she is employed as a governess at an imposing estate, where she falls in love with her employer, moody Rochester (Welles). Welles has a booming voice, wild eyes and a commanding attitude. He talks in riddles, and has a mysterious past. There is also an insane woman that he is holding prisoner in one of the castle's towers. Fontaine appears uncomfortable, and her acting mostly consists of silent suffering, which she does quite well, just as she did in "Rebecca". Her character falls in love very quickly with tempestous Rochester. This is credible, since her self-preservation instincts would sense the opportunity in marrying a wealthy man, and he is the first marriageable man that she has met. The film's biggest weakness is the ending. I won't give it away, but it comes suddenly and is a bit clumsily crafted. Still, "Jane Eyre" is a very enjoyable soaper, especially Welles' campy performance. |
REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:
Last night as I sat up until 2:00 a.m. engrossed in a showing of the 20th Century Fox version of Jane Eyre, I alternately cursed the frequent interruptions for the promotion of albums like Motels & Memories and local entrepreneurs like Mother’s Pizza (�Just like you remember it, only it really wasn’t ever this good!”) and revelled in the superb Dickensian detail of the sequences at Linwood School dominated by Henry Daniell’s marvelous portrayal of the sadistic religious fanati,c, Broadhurst.
I was moved by the moody, romantic sweep of the episodes at Rochester’s estate, with the brilliant portrayal of mad Mrs. Rochester’s husband by Orson Welles, supported by one of composer Bernard Herrmann’s finest scores.
The film is one of those meticulous re-creations of a literary classic that David Selznick, in particular, was gifted in bringing to life on the screen, but it has, at moments, something which such films often do not have: imaginative camera work which makes portions of the film seem as fresh as they did thirty-five years ago and confirms for me the rumors that Welles, coming to this project after Citizen Kane and the abortiveMagnificent Ambersons, co-directed certain scenes.
I thought I detected Wellesian touches in Jane’s introduction to Rochester at the manor; in the handling of the brief scene with Agnes Moorehead at the beginning as the camera in a sardonic low-angle shot accented the self-satisfied cruelty of Jane’s aunt and cousin; and in the exterior shots of the great house that squats malevolently at the film’s center, with its battlements and moody lighting that inevitably remind the viewer of Kane’s estate.
You will get some idea of the quality of the team that was assembled for this film when I tell you that two of the script-writers were Aldous Huxley and John Houseman and that, in addition to Welles, Daniell, Moorehead, and Joan Fontaine (as Jane), there are splendid performances by a group of actors that can only serve to remind us of the talent that was still available to the major studios in the early forties: Elizabeth Taylor, Peggy Ann Garner, Margaret O’Brien, Sara Allgood, John Sutton (in an uncommonly fine portrayal of Broadhurst’s sympathetic alter ego, Dr. Rivers), and other players whose names are less familiar but whose faces are indelibly imprinted on our memories of films of the period.
I was struck by the beauty of a line delivered by Welles as he described Jane’s first sight of Mrs. Rochester, “Look at Jane, all grave and silent at the mouth of Hell,” and bothered by the jarring modernity of another line describing Mrs. Rochester after her fatal leap as she “lay smashed on the pavement.”
I was riveted by a shot of Moorehead looking like a grinning Medusa and by the long shot of the wedding ceremony with the ominous entrance of an unseen “Guest” glimpsed only at first as a shadow slipping by against a shaft of light suddenly striking a sacristy wall.
And I was intrigued by the obvious attempt to introduce fairy-tale elements into the narrative, with the climax clearly using devices from “Beauty and the Beast” that could not have been accidental.
In short, I was overwhelmed by the intelligence, craftsmanship, and beauty of this film and reminded that film history is filled with superb movies that are often only entries in an edition of Movies That May Be Seen as Interruptions of Late-Night TV Commercials.
Reviews for the 1996 Version:
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
In her 1847 masterpiece, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë narrated the story of the pale, plain, independent-minded governess and her broody soul mate, Mr. Rochester, in the first person and addressed her audience directly as ''Reader.'' That way, she gave her story — so Dickensian in its unflinching depiction of childhood privation and misery, so forward thinking in its presentation of a woman in the free exercise of her own will — a confessional warmth that has attracted Readers for more than a century. In Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre, the newest film adaptation of Bronte's much-staged story (there have been three other Eyre films, including the 1944 classic starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine), the director (who cowrote the screenplay with Hugh Whitemore) gets the Dickensian gloom down pat but stints on the artless intimacy needed to fully thaw an otherwise icy gothic yarn.
The result is an odd Jane indeed: a saga shot in drab tones of brown, black, and gray; even the gorgeous gardens look damp. It's an Eyre that sweeps through big dramatic events — Jane's miserable years at a cruel charity school, her arrival as a governess at the great house called Thornfield Hall, her fateful meeting with the master of the house, the fire from which she rescues him, the confession of his Dark Secrets, another fire, the couple's singular romance — without inviting much emotional involvement. To fill the time, then, what we do is stare in fascination at Jane.
Or, rather, both Janes. The young girl who is sent by her hateful relatives to have her spirit broken at a stingy orphanage is played, with energy and intelligence, by Anna Paquin, the young Oscar winner fromThe Piano, who looks grave and beautiful. The older Jane is taken on by Charlotte Gainsbourg (The Cement Garden), one of those underdiscovered-actress choices (remember Olivia Hussey in his Romeo and Juliet?) for whom Zeffirelli is known. Gainsbourg is the possessor of a somber face, a mysteriously inflected voice (she's French, the daughter of English actress Jane Birkin and French musician Serge Gainsbourg), and an extraordinary neck that appears to be about a yard long, giving her small dark head the appearance of a pecan on a stalk. Leaning toward her Mr. Rochester (played, with relative restraint, by William Hurt) or conversing with the kindly housekeeper (Joan Plowright, doing one of her classic Plowrights, i.e., a senior citizen with shining eyes), Gainsbourg stretches out in a posture of vulnerability, and you think, Wow, what a neck. Which is something, Reader, you probably never thought when reading the original. B-
Review for the 2011 Version:
Reviewed by Chris Cabin
Would that I was able to tell you that, having seen every screen adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's classic Jane Eyre, including the BBC production(s) that reportedly dwarfs all other incarnations according to true Brontinites, I could now write of this latest adaptation, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, with a sure sense of where it falls in the lineage and, if it really matters, how faithful Moira Buffini's script has kept to its source material. Sadly, however, this is only the second adaptation of the tale that this particular reviewer has seen, the first being Franco Zeffirelli's splendid 1996 version, starring a young Charlotte Gainsbourg as the eponymous governess and William Hurt as the brooding Mr. Rochester, the employer for whom she falls hard.
As it turns out, however, Fukunaga's take on Brontë's gloomy vision of class, religious austerity, and the most closely guarded chambers of the heart needs no contrasting or comparisons to earn its rightful praise. A huge step forward from the director's middling, beautifully shot border-crossing debut, Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre puts far more stress on Fukunaga's exquisite sense of composition and working relationship with actors. It also thankfully sees him working from a script by Ms. Buffini, who did solid work adapting Tamara Drewe for Stephen Frears, which helps skim away many of the heavy-handed allegories and histrionic liberal handwringing that plagued Fukunaga's first film.
Buffini's largest contribution here is in the structure, as the film begins just as the titular heroine (Mia Wasikowska) escapes from her room at the Thornfield estate and finds herself in the company of kind strangers, namely St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell) and his two sisters. The story of how Jane was cast out by her heartless aunt (the invaluable Sally Hawkins) and went on to survive years of cruelty masked as discipline and the death of her best friend at a school run by a dictatorial clergyman (Simon McBurney) then snake its way in, until Jane's first days at Thornfield, where she meets the volcanic Rochester, played here by the brilliant Michael Fassbender in a ravenous performance.
Jane's years at Thornfield take up the greatest portion of the narrative. That allows Fukunaga, once again working with the talented cinematographer Adriano Goldman, to detail the alternatingly lush and bleak estate and the neighboring landscapes, not to mention the simple but breathtaking costume design courtesy of Michael O'Connor and Will Hughes-Jones's immaculate production design. So, as we witness Jane's growing affinity for her French pupil (Romy Settbon Moore), Thornfield's housekeeper (Judi Dench, a welcome addition as always) and, indeed, Mr. Rochester, we are also privy to the changing of the seasons, the glorious pallette of bright and dark colors that Fukanaga masterfully disperses within his frame, and the light curving around the gardens of the estate and the neighboring grand hills. But Fukunaga also employs great bleak space when trying to convey Jane's protective, almost comforting isolation.
That being said, there are more than a few facets of the production that scream of overcompensation on the director's part. Even before we gaze upon the madness of Rochester's first wife, we hear her and sense her in ghostly scenes that seem out of place, for no bigger reason than they are earnestly crafted to deliver cheap, insincere suspense. There's also the matter of Dario Marionelli's score, which overwhelms the scenery and the performers in several crucial moments, spoiling the subtle emotional charge the images speak to in the characters.
Whenever these failings are in danger of ruining the fluidity of the story, however, the cast seems to come more into focus and remains unwaveringly riveting. Fassbender is as stunning as ever, adding a lethal aggression and sexuality to Rochester, a character measured in sarcastic wit, knowledge, and silence in Hurt's earlier interpretation. As for Wasikowska, so funny and charming in The Kids Are All Right, she gives another wonderful, though wholly different, performance as Jane, sporting rhythmic delivery and simple, precise physicality. Their supporting cast matches the passionate lead turns, an essential ingredient in preparing period costume dramas as well-tread and dependent on manners as Jane Eyre or any popular Austen novel. But in the case of this latest incarnation, a rare balance has been struck between the dramatic choices and structure that delineate adaptations of Brontë's work, and the gentle, unique style of the director's vision.
As it turns out, however, Fukunaga's take on Brontë's gloomy vision of class, religious austerity, and the most closely guarded chambers of the heart needs no contrasting or comparisons to earn its rightful praise. A huge step forward from the director's middling, beautifully shot border-crossing debut, Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre puts far more stress on Fukunaga's exquisite sense of composition and working relationship with actors. It also thankfully sees him working from a script by Ms. Buffini, who did solid work adapting Tamara Drewe for Stephen Frears, which helps skim away many of the heavy-handed allegories and histrionic liberal handwringing that plagued Fukunaga's first film.
Buffini's largest contribution here is in the structure, as the film begins just as the titular heroine (Mia Wasikowska) escapes from her room at the Thornfield estate and finds herself in the company of kind strangers, namely St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell) and his two sisters. The story of how Jane was cast out by her heartless aunt (the invaluable Sally Hawkins) and went on to survive years of cruelty masked as discipline and the death of her best friend at a school run by a dictatorial clergyman (Simon McBurney) then snake its way in, until Jane's first days at Thornfield, where she meets the volcanic Rochester, played here by the brilliant Michael Fassbender in a ravenous performance.
Jane's years at Thornfield take up the greatest portion of the narrative. That allows Fukunaga, once again working with the talented cinematographer Adriano Goldman, to detail the alternatingly lush and bleak estate and the neighboring landscapes, not to mention the simple but breathtaking costume design courtesy of Michael O'Connor and Will Hughes-Jones's immaculate production design. So, as we witness Jane's growing affinity for her French pupil (Romy Settbon Moore), Thornfield's housekeeper (Judi Dench, a welcome addition as always) and, indeed, Mr. Rochester, we are also privy to the changing of the seasons, the glorious pallette of bright and dark colors that Fukanaga masterfully disperses within his frame, and the light curving around the gardens of the estate and the neighboring grand hills. But Fukunaga also employs great bleak space when trying to convey Jane's protective, almost comforting isolation.
That being said, there are more than a few facets of the production that scream of overcompensation on the director's part. Even before we gaze upon the madness of Rochester's first wife, we hear her and sense her in ghostly scenes that seem out of place, for no bigger reason than they are earnestly crafted to deliver cheap, insincere suspense. There's also the matter of Dario Marionelli's score, which overwhelms the scenery and the performers in several crucial moments, spoiling the subtle emotional charge the images speak to in the characters.
Whenever these failings are in danger of ruining the fluidity of the story, however, the cast seems to come more into focus and remains unwaveringly riveting. Fassbender is as stunning as ever, adding a lethal aggression and sexuality to Rochester, a character measured in sarcastic wit, knowledge, and silence in Hurt's earlier interpretation. As for Wasikowska, so funny and charming in The Kids Are All Right, she gives another wonderful, though wholly different, performance as Jane, sporting rhythmic delivery and simple, precise physicality. Their supporting cast matches the passionate lead turns, an essential ingredient in preparing period costume dramas as well-tread and dependent on manners as Jane Eyre or any popular Austen novel. But in the case of this latest incarnation, a rare balance has been struck between the dramatic choices and structure that delineate adaptations of Brontë's work, and the gentle, unique style of the director's vision.
