OT: Jane Eyre

There will be a Richard Armitage-related post today. I just wanted to store this information. This is neither a formal review, nor an academic reaction (I’m not sure that I’ve seen any of the other dramatizations of Jane Eyre). Went with friends to the matinee this morning at eleven in my favorite theatre in the world. Wonderful to wake up watching Jane Eyre and eating yogurt with granola.

• excellent script, I thought, given the problems of dramatizing a novel from the 1840s and also of treating a text that is so beloved of so many. The film only lost my attention twice, and once it was probably because the waiter was passing in front of me with something that smelled good. The other time, though, was a bit tricky, right in the beginning as Jane is running away from Thornfield. I sort of had to wrench my notice back to the screen at that point. I particularly liked the decision to shorten drastically most of the childhood material — this is the hardest part for modern audiences to understand and it is also the point at which any script of this film runs the greatest risk of self-undermining melodrama. Brontë’s commentary on Victorian morals is more subtle than the average reader today realizes.
• Mia Wasikowska!!!! OMG Mia Wasikowska! What an amazing actress. Had never heard of her before, nor seen her other stuff, but I’m putting any more of her work I can get my hands on onto my must-see list. The quality of her acting I loved most here: her capacity to let her thoughts onto her face so subtly, so that it was worthwhile for the camera to linger on her face after she shut a door, for example, to see what her reaction to the dialogue in the previous scene had been. She seems to be able to tell us what she’s thinking merely by means of the way she draws a breath. Her face draws attention to the inner life of the characters in ways that we don’t see so often from the current crowd of leading lady wannabes. I want to see much, much more of her, in a wide variety of roles. She’s literally transfixing — she’d be worth watching frame by frame to catch everything her face is saying.
• Michael Fassbender, on the other hand, although he’s clearly handsome and fits physically the general parameters of “my type,” left me uninterested. I thought he had two really effective scenes: the early one in the living room, where he looks at Jane’s drawings, and the final scene of the movie. Honestly, I feel like the first scene was so strong because it was well scripted; and the last scene was strong because Rochester is blind at that point in the narrative and so Fassbender can’t / shouldn’t move his eyes. I felt consistently throughout the performance that Fassbender didn’t have the upper half of his face under control and that his eye movements were constantly, sometimes ironically, undermining his effect. To me this was particularly problematic in the scene where Rochester confesses his love to Jane (who at that point thinks he wishes to marry Blanche Ingram). He displays a limited range of visual expression here — and none of it is especially subtle. Once he is forced to stop using his eyes, you get the sense that he could be a great actor. But by then it was too late for me. I’ve been told Hunger is great, and I will seek that out, but I’m now on notice as skeptical.
• I.e., I, and my friend’s partner (who’s emphatically not a Janeite), did not really “feel” from the production why Jane loved Rochester. I think this is ok from Wasikowska’s side (albeit disappointing), as Jane’s supposed to have a sober exterior, and this is the Victorian period and we’re not supposed to have women projecting their deepest inner passions, but I never felt Wasikowska got much back from Fassbender. It’s a feature of the character that Rochester feels arrogant, put-upon, and sorry for himself, but especially for me, the crucial scene mentioned above (Rochester says he loves Jane, not Blanche Ingram), is not only misplayed — it is heavily devoid of anything like a believable passion from Fassbender. Disappointing.
• Exceptionally well cast, great supporting performance, the part of the film I’m most enthused about after Wasikowska: Jamie Bell as St. John Rivers. This is another character that easily risks a descent into plot-undermining melodrama, not least because Brontë obviously dislikes both the type and her personification of it in this novel so much, but Bell is simply excellent, with his naturalistic performance giving us a sense of Rivers as a human being — a man whose belief in G-d is first ecstatic rather than inherently or predominantly triumphalist. Bell confronts the audience with the inflexibility of character that makes Rivers such an unattractive romantic partner only at the very end of his performance, yet we see the dilemma in which St. John finds himself regarding Jane easily quite early on. A child actor who’s learned to act. Impressive. His performance was also the main thing to like about the rather wretched The Eagle. He doesn’t have a leading man’s face, but I’ll be hoping to see more of him as well.
• Other people we know: Holliday Grainger of Sparkhouse and Robin Hood fame, who’s just fine, but whose part has been made disappointingly small (one of the few disappointments of the script for me. I like the Rivers sisters but we don’t see entirely why it is that Jane likes them as the explanation is reduced to the shorthand of “you saved my life”). Very much looking forward to her performance of Lucrezia in The Borgias.

Anyway, discuss: I’m sure that most of you are much more informed about this production than I am.

~ by Servetus on March 27, 2011.