Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre
21-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska stars in the latest screen adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Wasikowska makes a perfectly “plain” and “obscure” Jane; she’s thin, pale, with severely parted hair, and she does look as if she’s fresh out of school.
There’s some flashing back and forward in the first part of director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 120-minute film; when we do arrive at the beginning, we find an adorable Amelia Clarkson as 10-year-old Jane, who’s living with her abusive aunt, played by Sally Hawkins, and her cousins. Jane spends the next few years at the equally-harsh Lowood boarding school, and then leaves to take up a job as governess at Thornfield Hall.
In this new Jane Eyre, Wasikowska captures all the qualities that we admire in Jane. She carries the pain of her childhood, but she doesn’t burden anyone with it; she’s brave, honest, and composed. She’s hardworking, quick-witted, and perceptive; she sizes up people and things clearly. Despite being raised by uncaring guardians who never encouraged her, she has confidence in herself, and she’s not incapable of loving — quite the opposite, in fact.
Jane Eyre is, at its heart, a timeless love story between an impoverished young woman and her employer, the handsome and wealthy Edward Rochester. Jane quickly falls in love with Rochester, and when she sees him courting a pretty socialite, she’s devastated. She announces that she is leaving Thornfied because she can’t bear to witness him with another woman, but he asks her to stay. She replies:
“Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? A machine without feelings?… Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you, — and full as much heart!…”
But then he asks her to marry him, telling Jane that she is his equal, his likeness. It’s fairytale stuff.
But this is where Fukunaga’s film falls down. A smoldering chemistry exists between Jane and Rochester, but Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender don’t manifest it. When they finally kiss and embrace, they look awkward. They carry off their individual characters perfectly well — although Fassbender’s Rochester is a bit superficial — but together, they don’t work. The lead actors in the BBC’s 2006 four-part miniseries, on the other hand, looked like a genuine match made in heaven.
As we all know, Jane doesn’t marry Rochester after he first proposes because it turns out he’s already married (to a crazy woman). Jane flees Thornfield, gets another job, and discovers she has family. But she can’t forget about Rochester, and she returns to Thornfield to find it in blackened ruins.
Bertha has set the house alight and committed suicide, and Rochester has lost his sight. But he still loves Jane, and Jane loves him, and now they can finally be together. It’s fairytale stuff, once again — except without the chemistry, in this latest adaptation.
