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Buffini’s script, while it trims and winnows some of Brontë’s empurpled passages, preserves important elements of the author’s language, including, above all, Jane’s repeated invocations of freedom as an ethical and personal ideal. And as in Dickens, the brutality and dogmatic moral arrogance of Jane’s righteous oppressors at the Lowood school have a political dimension, one compounded by Brontë’s clearsighted feminism. The oppressors are so awful, the oppressed so innocent, that the desire to see justice done becomes an almost physical hunger. There is something voluptuous in the rage inspired by the kind of meanness we are used to calling Dickensian.
#Jane eyre movie review new york times movie#
And the movie audience, like the 19th-century novel-reading public, can relish, with only slight queasiness, the sadomasochistic spectacle of boarding school cruelty.
#Jane eyre movie review new york times series#
John Rivers (Jamie Bell), and his two sisters (Holliday Grainger and Tamzin Merchant) then her earlier life unfolds in a series of flashbacks that compress many pages into a few potent scenes and images.ĭespised by the aunt in whose care she has landed and abused by her cousins and the servants, Jane (played as a child by Amelia Clarkson) nonetheless manages to cultivate her innate decency and bolster it with self-reliance. She is taken in and nursed back to health by a young clergyman, St. The opening scene shows Jane in desperate flight from Thornfield Hall, dashing across the stormy landscape as if pursued by demons and menaced by a ghostly, wind-borne voice.
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Fukunaga’s film tells its venerable tale with lively vigor and an astute sense of emotional detail. Neither a radical updating nor a stiff exercise in middlebrow cultural respectability, Mr.
#Jane eyre movie review new york times how to#
This “Jane Eyre,” energetically directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) from a smart, trim script by Moira Buffini (“Tamara Drewe”), is a splendid example of how to tackle the daunting duty of turning a beloved work of classic literature into a movie. It is hardly surprising that this book has inspired so many film adaptations over the last hundred years, the latest of which stars Mia Wasikowska as Jane, the beleaguered governess. The novel’s blend of Christian piety, Gothic horror, barely suppressed eroticism and high-toned comedy satisfied readerly appetites in the Victorian era and ever after.
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Much as Jane combines what would seem to be incompatible traits within a single voice and body - her employer and soul mate, Edward Rochester, is an even wilder brew of contradictions - so does Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” mash up genres and effects with mesmerizing virtuosity. She is brave, humble, spirited and honest, the kind of person readers fall in love with and believe themselves to be in their innermost hearts, where literary sympathy lies. From the very first pages of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 book, Jane embodies virtues that might be off-putting if they were not so persuasive, and if her story were not such a marvelous welter of grim suffering and smoldering passion. Jane Eyre may lack fortune and good looks - she is famously “small and plain” as well as “poor and obscure” - but as the heroine of a novel, she has everything.