The story does follow the novel with a loyal precision. On the whole, it's easier to say what is different than what stays the same. Yes, the romance is all there and intact, but the story is and remains even bigger than that. There is an emphasis on the relationship between Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, but it's not merely a tale of older man meets girl. I admit that I was worried that this miniseries would reduce the story to a romance with bumps along the way. Where such locations could not be simply co-opted into the production, replicas have been sought and used. The moors which Jane stumbles across are the very moors that Charlotte had in mind. Director Susanna White didn't have to create an authentic backdrop, because she took us into the very places where Charlotte found her own inspiration. Jane Eyre (2006) is filmed in part in that very same hall. Charlotte was writing Jane Eyre at the time and many distinct details from the house made their way into her novel. The scenery alone makes this a movie worth watching.īut it also demonstrates a great deal of knowledge on the part of the location crew themselves.Ĭharlotte Brontë's friend, Ellen Nussey, described how they visited the Eyre family at Hathersage Hall, in Derbyshire. It's all filmed in Brontë country, up on the Yorkshire Moors and Derbyshire Dales. There are great sweeping views in this movie. There were nominations in several other areas, not least a best actress one for Ruth Wilson in the title role. The attention to detail shown in costume and make-up earned the company several BAFTA and Primetime Emmy awards. Masterpiece Theatre had a large budget with which to get it right.
Now we have that out of the way, let me say that this adaption is probably as good as it gets.
If Charlotte Brontë was bundled into a time-machine and taught how to write and direct a screen-play, the film would still not be as good as that novel written back in 1847. There's Jane being shipped off to the parochial Lowood charity school where she suffers the brimstone abuses of the zealous headmaster (Simon McBurney) and sees her gentle best friend (Fraya Parks) die of consumption.No Jane Eyre movie is ever going to be better than the book. There're scenes of the spirited young Jane (Amelia Clarkson) being brutally mistreated by her hateful aunt (Sally Hawkins) and priggish cousins. John Rivers (Jamie Bell of “Billy Elliot” fame) and his kindly sisters (Holliday Grainger and Tamzin Merchant), we hark back to the chapters that brought her here. After a shivering Jane is taken in by the pious clergyman St.
The movie opens with Jane fleeing Thornfield Hall and Rochester's dire secret into a sodden, storm-swept night on the desolate moors. Unlike previous versions (notably the 1944 Orson Welles-Joan Fontaine film and the lush 1996 Franco Zeffirelli picture), this film radically shuffles the story's chronology and opens with a nifty framing device before condensing Jane's cruel Victorian childhood into concise flashbacks. But it seems his fresh eyes and contemporary sensibilities serve the material well. In the fairly flinty but lovely performance by Mia Wasikowska (“Alice in Wonderland”) as Jane, in the cannily configured script by British playwright Moira Buffini (“Tamara Drewe”) and in the bold, richly visual direction of Fukunaga this film seems surprisingly fresh, more tough-minded and less melodramatic than previous versions.įukunaga, a film phenom who earned a Student Oscar at the University of California, Santa Cruz and launched his career strongly with the tough immigrant thriller “Sin Nombre,” seems an odd choice to helm this elaborate period piece. So what's new to glean from this heavily worked literary artifact whose 38 chapters are chockablock with florid motifs and allusions (from romanticism to Gothic horror from the Byronic hero to the madwoman in the attic) and whose five sections range through hefty matters of morality and religion, social class and gender relations, love and passion, independence and the search for home and family, as well as atonement and forgiveness?
Since 1910, Bronte's sprawling, multithemed, five-stage tome has spawned 18 film versions, at least 10 TV adaptations, a radio drama, a two-act ballet, a stage musical, an opera, a symphonic interpretation, a graphic novel, numerous literary spinoffs, prequels and sequels and more. Any filmgoer looking askance at yet another adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's often-filmed 1847 novel “Jane Eyre” can rest assured that the new one by up-and-coming director Cary Fukunaga is a smart, worthy addition to the book's burgeoning, multimedia canon.