‘This is no plain Jane,’ say critics about new film

SOME might say Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre has been done to death. There are at least fifteen previous feature film adaptations, ten TV versions, several ballets, one graphic novel and innumerable literary spin-offs.

"Is anything fresh even possible?" asks Peter Travers in Rolling Stone magazine. The answer, thankfully, is yes. This latest update to the classic gothic romance novel has enough power, charm and wit to stand out from the rest, and as Travers notes, "They've wisely cast it young" which has "reanimated a classic for a new generation".
 
Michael Fassbender plays the haunted Mr Rochester, a rich man who falls in love with the sharp mind and quiet charm of Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska), the poor, plain governess he has hired for his ward.
 
Time Out's David Jenkins writes that Jane Eyre sees 34-year-old Fassbender – also in A Dangerous Method – "cement his natural flair for playing muscular, sexually domineering and morally tainted alpha males".
 
But the real gem, for most critics, is 21-year-old Wasikowska. This is a "breakthrough performance" for the Alice in Wonderland star, says Jenkins, with "depth, charisma and technical rigour... This is no plain Jane."
 
Praise must also go to director Cary Joji Fukunaga. He won a number of awards in 2009 with his first film Sin Nombre, a movie about Mexican gangs which he both wrote and directed. But the well-known story of Jane Eyre was a completely different challenge. The result, says A O Scott in the New York Times, is a "splendid example of how to tackle the daunting duty of turning a beloved work of classic literature into a movie".
 
"Neither a radical updating nor a stiff exercise in middlebrow cultural respectability," Scott writes, "Fukunaga's film tells its venerable tale with lively vigour and an astute sense of emotional detail."
 
Writing in the LA Times, Kenneth Turan calls Fukunaga "an intense, visceral filmmaker with a love for melodramatic situations". He has made a "shrewd choice" in drawing out the story's gothic elements, Turan adds, setting gloomy castles and bumps in the night against Yorkshire's desolate landscapes and a sweeping score.
 
But for Peter Rainer in the Christian Science Monitor, "the tracking shots and throbbing violins" are too much. The film "lacks what it most needs – passion," he writes. "Without it, this Jane Eyre is a lot closer to a middling horror film than a brooding piece of deep-dish romanticism."
 
Jane Eyre is in cinemas September 9. ·