Jane Eyre

Interesting adaptation, in that what you'd expect from Jane Eyre is a Gothic Melodrama. Whereas this is relatively sedate. We start with Jane fleeing from a big house, and clearly Something Terrible Has Happened. She runs out onto the moors, gets a bit lost, gets thoroughly soaked, is close to death, and is eventually taken in by a vicar and his two sisters, who nurse her back to health. And then we get, in flashback, how Jane has got to where she is right now, from her dreadful, dreadful childhood, to her becoming governess of the ward of Edward Rochester, a well-to-do gentleman of dark moods and a dark past. He and Jane hit it off immediately, apparently through a mutual belief that everyone else in the world is a blithering idiot, and a forbidden and probably doomed romance begins to blossom. I say probably doomed; she runs out onto the moors to die of exposure right at the start, so they've blown that one.

It's odd, I think, in that the two principal characters, Jane and Rochester, both have the air of almost modern characters; everyone else is very much buying into the social mores that bind them, whereas Jane and Rochester more sort of seem to accept them with the eye-rolling reluctance of teenagers who have to accept the ludicrously outmoded rules set by parents. That modern image isn't exactly dispelled by casting either Mia Wasikowska (who played the teenage daughter in The Kids Are Alright) or Michael Fassbender (Magneto!). Neither of them really puts a foot wrong, performance wise, and they've got ample support from the likes of Judi Dench and Sally Hawkins. However, I do get the sense of liberties being taken.

I can't claim to be a scholar of the text, nor really having paid attention to previous adaptations, but what I really get a sense of is a script and director trying to give the film a modern sensibility. And while that does make it undeniably watchable, I'm wondering whether it really does the text a service.