When she reaches 18 she leaves the school, and moves to Thornfield Hall to be governess to the young Adele, the French ward of Mr Edward Fairfax Rochester.įassbender is a perfect Rochester, highlighting what we know and love to hate about the character without turning the man into a Victorian caricature. There’s a subtlety to her exterior self that only partly cloaks her fiery spirit.
Mia Wasikowska as the adult Jane excels at portraying that passion and zest for life, and a yearning for something more, running forward even if it looks as if she’s running away. “You have a passion for living, Jane” says her school friend Helen (Freya Parks). Her aunt, Mrs Reed (Sally Hawkins, delightfully horrible, in her over-elaborate, old-fashioned dresses) sends her away, where Jane’s independent spirit soon brushes up against the institution’s rule-bound cruelties. The young Jane (Amelia Clarkson) is extraordinarily self-possessed, retorting to the headmaster come to assess her for his school that to avoid the burning fires of hell she will simply “stay in good health and not die”. It’s essentially two giant flashbacks, to her schooldays and then to her time as a governess in Mr Rochester’s household at Thornfield Hall. This is a film that starts near the end, as a rain-drenched Jane knocks on the door of a house on the moors, in distress, and is taken in by the Reverend St John Rivers (Jamie Bell, good as a man trying to be a patriarch to his sisters and not really succeeding) and his siblings Diana (Holliday Grainger) and Mary (Tamzin Merchant). But when he returns he brings the weight of the world back with him as well as his own state of near-permanent exasperation with women and girls, creating an atmosphere fussy with unspoken stories and brooding irritation.
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There have been so many adaptations that sometimes one feels one has up-on-the-moors fatigue, though this is fresh rather than bracing, rather like Jane herself – despite most of it taking place in a draughty old house, full of secrets.Īctually the house, though filled with the dark furniture of the time, feels rather bright and fun when Mr Rochester (Michael Fassbender) isn’t at home. There’s always a clamour for yet more remakes and adaptations of classic literature, and the paradox is then giving those same people something new and fresh which retains what makes the original so successful, whether that’s story or heart (or both).ĭirector Cary Fukunaga has done a terrific job with this version of Charlotte Bronte’s 19th century classic, making clearer the universality of the teenage Jane’s feelings (this a film for all ages but particularly for young women) while relating a well-established story. Jane (Mia Wasikowska), just turned 18 and working in a new position as a governess on the windswept Yorkshire moors, is a thoroughly modern heroine, partly because our feelings and reactions at different stages of life don’t change that much down the centuries. Her most exciting trip is usually a damp trot to the postbox. “I’ve never seen a city” Jane laments, worrying, as so many teenagers do, that life is passing her by: “I’ve never spoken with men and fear my whole life will pass”. *** Read my interview with Jane Eyre’s Oscar-winning costume designer Michael O’Connor ***
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