A Guide to the Cinematic Jane Eyres

The book-to-movie phenomenon is nothing rare; neither is it new. As long as movies have been around, moviemakers have been cribbing stories from books. Jane Eyre, one of the greatest British novels of all time (and, in my opinion, the best of the output of the three Brontë sisters—sorry, Wuthering Heights), has been filmed dozens of times. Why it is so attractive to filmmakers is pretty clear: it features a wonderful, sensitive role for a woman and a bold, tour-de-force role for a man, it’s got tragic elements as well as feel-good elements, and OF COURSE the great romance. My IMDb search showed that—in addition to the Hollywood Jane Eyres (they do one about every twenty years) and the BBC Jane Eyres (they do one about every ten)—there were multiple Eyres filmed in the silent era (pre-1927) and multiple Eyres from multiple cultures (for example, Greece, India, Brazil and the Netherlands). Several years ago I even saw a ballet version of the story.

I couldn’t watch every adaptation, of course; some were just not obtainable. But I did my best. So, presented for your consideration, the seven major Jane Eyres.

Jane Eyre 1934

Jane: Virginia Bruce

Rochester: Colin Clive

Directed by: Christy Cabanne

Everything you need to know about this version of Jane Eyre can be summed up in one sentence: Jane is blonde. As a little girl she wears her hair in sausage curls which are cut off her head when she gets to the Lowood School, because, as well all know, curled hair is a sign of vanity! When Jane finds herself at Thornfield, she does not let being the governess stop her from dressing in big, bustled gowns. This is all par for the course for the 1930s. They wanted actresses to be blonde and glamorous (Dorothy Gale almost was). So much for literature’s greatest Plain Jane.

None of the other characters really work either. Rochester’s ladyfriend Blanche Ingram looks ready to retire. She’s supposed to be youthful and beautiful and glamorous, not a washed-up old hag. Adele, Rochester’s ward, in the grand tradition of movie kids, is routinely annoying, but 1934’s Adele is gifted in this arena. She falls into a giant vase and screams, feet waving. She is practically developmentally delayed. And Bertha! The crazed wife in the attic! In this version, there is no wedding for a spurned brother to ruin—they never get there. Instead, Bertha is discovered when she just kind of wanders into the room, singing and wide-eyed, more in the broken-mind Ophelia camp of crazy than the psychotic camp.

The movie cuts out a great deal of the story—again, par for the course when your average movie run time is 85 minutes—but it does an all right job of condensing the material. The film cuts out the entire “Jane lives with the Rivers family sequence,” and, after she leaves Thornfield, she goes to work in a poorhouse instead. She returns to Thornfield after hearing of Bertha’s fate from a Thornfield servant.

The worst of this version is what is done to the main characters’ personalities. Jane’s blonde hair is the tip of the iceberg. She struts around, flirting, singing, full of smiles and brimming with confidence. She does not seem to carry a lifetime of privation on her shoulders, which is so crucial to Jane’s character. Rochester is worse. He is polite and moons over Jane almost immediately. He is gentle with his young ward, Adele. He has no anger, no bitterness, no sharpness. When Jane leaves him, she writes a note to him on Adele’s school slate. By this point I was so tired of his milquetoast behavior I was chanting “Smash it! Smash it!” He sets it down carefully.

Verdict: Jane = Bad, Rochester = Bad, Romance = Adequate, Gothicism = Nonexistent, Overall = SKIP

Jane Eyre 1943

Jane: Joan Fontaine

Rochester: Orson Welles

Directed by: Robert Stevenson

Other notables: Margaret O’Brien as Adele, Agnes Moorehead as Mrs. Reed, Elizabeth Taylor as Helen Burns

A big Hollywood production, starring Joan Fontaine, who had won an Oscar the year before (for Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion) and Orson Welles. Watching this film, I face an immediate problem: I hate Joan Fontaine. There are very few actors and actresses that I hate from the classic era, but they do exist: Van Johnson, Fred Astaire, Carole Lombard. And Joan Fontaine. She always played (at least every role I’ve ever seen her in) timid and skittish, and she had a strange, crooked mouth that made her appear to be almost constantly nauseated. This actually worked to her benefit in Suspicion, and in her other most famous role, as Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca. Both those characters suffer from the belief that someone in their household is trying to kill them. The character of Jane Eyre, on the other hand, while timid, is not skittish; she is measured and calm, to an extent that makes her (according to Mr. Rochester in the book) almost other-worldly. He likes that he can’t rattle her like he does everybody else. There’s a moment from the book that is revisited in most movie versions where Mrs. Ingram—the mother of Jane’s rival for Mr. Rochester’s affections—makes a speech about how awful governesses are, either not realizing or not caring that Jane is in the room. Some cinematic Janes straighten their spines at this moment because Jane, regardless of class distinctions, is better than Mrs. Ingram and she knows it. Fontaine’s Jane responds to this slight by dashing out of the room and crying. She looks like someone punched a bunny.

On the other hand, you’ve got Orson Welles, who is a more-than-adequate Rochester. He was still relatively young and thin here, and not afraid to be a villain. (I just saw The Stranger, where he is a Nazi sympathizer hiding out in New England. He also plays the villain to excellent effect in The Third Man.) As Rochester, Welles growls; he lashes out with Rochester’s bitter rage. Taking a walk with his betrothed, Blanche Ingram, he lays her flat with his honesty: he knows she is only marrying him for his money, and he is OK with it. She is mortally insulted, of course; he says not to be coy. They break it off, which was his ultimate goal the whole time: Jane has been made adequately jealous and so he can kick Blanche to the curb now. (YES. He is Rochester. He behaves badly. OFTEN.)

Another excellent feature of the 1943 film is the Gothicism. I am a lover of the dark and brooding, and the book has plenty of that, but most movie versions set it entirely aside. This one is dark, there’s mist. Thornfield has spires and disturbing statuary and any number of unexplored corners. Importantly, there’s the climactic thunderstorm and the tree struck by lightning that foretells Jane and Rochester’s parting.

Funnily enough, the biggest star in this movie is not even credited for the role she plays. For about ten minutes at the beginning, while Jane is still a child and going to Lowood, her best friend is Helen Burns—a truly underrated character, who is beatific in the face of death and thus, teaches young Jane how to let go of bitterness and forgive. She lays out the entire moral framework for adult Jane. In this version she is played by an 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, who does a great job.

Verdict: Jane = Bad, Rochester = Great, Romance = Adequate, Gothicism = Great, Overall = SEE

Ahead: Janes from 1983, 1996, 1997, 2006, and 2011

Oscar Predictions 2011

I have to open with a statement of regret: I meant to have full reviews of all of the main Oscar-nominated movies before the broadcast of the actual awards tomorrow.  But then SNOW happened, and I got a day off work on Friday, and my fully-composed reviews of The Social Network, 127 Hours, and Animal Kingdom are all currently residing on my work computer.  And I am just too lazy to rewrite them.

So, basically, some of my predictions and/or preferences are going to seem out-of-the-blue.  Reviews that will elucidate my points of view are forthcoming!

Best Foreign Film

Preferred: Biutiful

Predicted: Incendies

Best Documentary Feature

Preferred: Restrepo

Predicted: Inside Job

Best Animated Film

Preferred: Toy Story 3

Predicted: Toy Story 3

Best Adapted Screenplay

Preferred: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, True Grit

Predicted: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay

Preferred: Christopher Nolan, Inception

Predicted: David Seidler, The King’s Speech

Best Supporting Actor

Preferred: John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone

Predicted: Christian Bale, The Fighter

Best Supporting Actress

Preferred: Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Predicted: Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Best Actor

Preferred: Colin Firth, The King’s Speech

Predicted: Colin Firth, The King’s Speech

Best Actress

Preferred: Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right

Predicted: Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Best Director

Preferred: Christopher Nolan, Inception (but he was NOT EVEN NOMINATED) (of the nominees, Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan)

Predicted: David Fincher, The Social Network

Best Picture

Preferred: Black Swan

Predicted: The King’s Speech

Oscar Catch-Up Round Two

The Kids Are All Right

I love two big Hollywood actresses agreeing to do this movie.  Ten years ago people would have been all scandalized or impressed that they spend some of that time kissing and hugging on each other.  Now we’re all pretty comfortable with The Gay (at least on our movie screens) and that’s not been an issue for this movie.  What was really fearless of these two women—Annette Bening and Julianne Moore—was for them to appear onscreen messy-haired and unmakeupped for the duration.  This is not one of these Nicole Kidman prosthetic nose deals.  These women showed their actual faces, how they actually look.  And they are lovely, lovely women, who happen to be old enough to convincingly play the mothers of teenagers, to be part of a couple that’s been together for the better part of two decades.  And OK with it.

They are a fun couple, and their lives are worth stepping into for two hours.  I love Bening’s character’s rant in the restaurant about how everybody is so compulsively green and granola-eating.  That’s how I feel every time I step into a Whole Foods.  Bening’s character, Nic, was my anchor in the movie.  She was probably everybody’s.  She just wanted to do her job, raise her kids, love her wife, and not have to go through the motions of embracing this weird guy—the Sperm Donor—who wants to step in.  But she makes valiant efforts because she loves her kids and it seems important to them.  And then it’s important to her wife, Jules (Moore), because the guy can get her business up and running.  And Nic makes valiant efforts there, too.  And she is unexpectedly bruised and burned for her efforts, and Bening does a beautiful job of crumbling under the duress and then holding the pieces together.

One problem with the movie is that it seemed to want me to care more about the kids than I could manage.  They had their own plotlines—the daughter had a platonic guy friend she was too afraid to kiss, and the son had fallen under the influence of his really ugly best friend.  These scenes were routinely uninteresting.

Jump ahead for The Fighter, True Grit, and a spoilery finish to my review of The Kids Are All Right