Cary Joji Fukunaga (2011)

It begins with the heroine running down a narrow passage and lane and from there into a huge, harsh, empty landscape.  The weather is spectacular, rapidly changing from ardent sunset to lashing rain.  The young woman stumbles and falls unconscious.  It all seems overscaled and hollowly existential – nearly a parody of our ideas about Victorian romantic drama – but it turns out to be a flash forward to Jane Eyre’s anguished departure from her life with Mr Rochester, after the interruption of their marriage service and the revelation that he already has a wife, locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall.  The sequence is still not among the best in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre but, at its proper point in the story, it no longer seems anything like as inflated as at the start.  This is a mark of how good what’s happened in between is, a tribute in particular to Mia Wasikowska – the best Jane Eyre I’ve seen.

The young Jane is played by Amelia Clarkson, who has a bit of Hayley Mills and a bit of Shelley Duvall about her face but who’s strongly individual.    Ten-year-old Jane is hiding herself on a window seat, the curtain drawn over it, reading a book; her cousin John Reed whacks her because he’s got nothing better to do (and he’s a vile bully).  We immediately get a sense of how this girl can hold her nerve then, moments later, how she’ll stand up for herself both physically (she gets her own back on John) and verbally (against his mother).  We realise that Jane Eyre’s courageous candour will cause problems for her; and it’s this quality especially that carries through from Amelia Clarkson to Mia Wasikowska, although so too does the sense of a keen intelligence at work.   Wasikowska is obviously going to be cast as pretty women in the future but this isn’t a case where the withholding of beauty, keeping it under wraps, seems to be merely a matter of skilful make-up and costuming (although they are skilful).  Wasikowska really does beautify Jane through the personality she creates.  This girl is acutely aware of her age and social position, puzzled and alarmed by the older, wealthy man who takes a shine to her. She uses her wit to hold her own in conversation with him and to keep the force of his personality and her own passion at bay – and it’s an increasing struggle.  Wasikowska plays the role with concentration and integrity:  she’s equally convincing whether venting emotion (as in her superbly sustained outburst against Rochester when she thinks he’s going to announce that he’s marrying Blanche Ingram and he ends up proposing to Jane) or watching with bewildered apprehension as he drags her along to the church for their wedding, and he’s suddenly miles away from her, his mind on something else.   Wasikowska doesn’t just handle the Northern accent convincingly – she understands the emotional penetration and variety it can yield.

Mia Wasikowska isn’t quite twenty-two years old and she epitomises the youth of the cast (Cary Fukunaga himself is only thirty-four).  In the case of Jane, this is faithful to the book (she’s eighteen when she goes to Thornfield as governess) but it’s unusual to see actors in their twenties and early thirties playing roles in Jane Eyre and the effect is not only refreshing but touching:  it gives you a different sense of how relatively short lives were in the mid-nineteenth century – and, because the conditions of these lives are also relatively arduous, how quickly people had to learn to cope with them.   You get this even in characters who are largely antipathetic – in Jane’s aunt Mrs Reed and, especially, in St John Rivers.  Sally Hawkins is oddly cast and slightly ill at ease as Mrs Reed but, as usual, she’s worth watching.  (Craig Griffiths, whose mother Hawkins was in Submarine too, makes a brief but effectively creepy appearance as the nastily cowardly John Reed.)  Jamie Bell, now twenty-five, creates a well-judged, nuanced portrait of St John Rivers:  there’s something inadequate and self-seeking about this young minister from the start but Bell is clever enough to prevent you from being able to put your finger on it while St John is doing apparently decent things.   Even at the end, you’re conscious of how immature he is to be setting off for a missionary life on the other side of the world.

Michael Fassbender is a surprisingly young Rochester too but Cary Fukunaga’s percipient casting pays off.  Fassbender easily suggests someone with an unhappy, determinedly closed off past – the fact that his Rochester is still, to outward appearances, a young man brings an increased poignancy to his situation:  you realise his youth is being extinguished because you can still see the embers of it.   There’s a strong connection between the two principals from their first meeting in the tenebrous wood, when Rochester comes off his horse, and a sexual dimension is salient not just in that famous encounter but throughout.  This animates the drama in a very persuasive way.  The scene in which Jane finds the curtains in Rochester’s bedroom ablaze and wakes him up is excellent:  the circumstances mean that the governess sees the master in his nightshirt and turns away as he puts on his trousers – the surprising physical frankness of the moment is made credible and covered by the urgency of the situation but doesn’t go unnoticed.  Like Wasikowska, Fassbender uses wit as a weapon – but, in his case, sometimes an offensive weapon.   When he tells Jane he doesn’t care for children then says something sarcastic to his ward, Jane’s pupil Adele (Romy Settbon Moore), the mordancy of his tone is both funny and chilling:  Rochester seriously doesn’t like her.  The two actors help each other.  Fassbender’s charm and dynamism enable Wasikowska to bring to life Jane’s predicament:  she experiences Rochester as a sexual being yet the idea of a sexual relationship with such a man seems impossible.  When he asks Jane if she thinks him handsome and she says no, the exchange is more potent because he is:  Jane has to try to deny it to herself (and she’s also compelled by her moral sense to remind him that good looks aren’t enough anyway).  Wasikowska’s luminous quality and emotional agility give Fassbender something to keep trying to follow and get hold of:  she allows him to make complete sense of what Rochester says about being bewitched by Jane.

You perceive not just what this pair see in each other but what they can’t see.  He doesn’t notice her jealousy until he feels the force of it in the proposal scene.  She’s compelled by his eyes:  their magnetising gaze and the misery in them are indivisible.  (By the time she fully understands that misery his eyes have been destroyed.)  Fassbender’s accent is less secure – but that seems right:  Rochester has lived in different parts of the world and lacks a sense of home.  After the debacle of the wedding service, he seems less convincing in Rochester’s apology to Jane but perhaps this is right too – there’s no way he can’t, in this moment, be diminished in how Jane sees him.   He looks a bit too tragically styled in the final scene but he’s great in the very last shot of the film as the reunited couple embrace.  Rochester’s tremble, as he embraces Jane and although we see only the upper part of the two bodies, seems to go from head to foot. This also is the best Rochester I’ve seen.  It’s the kind of performance which isn’t just exciting in itself but leaves you excited about what the actor’s going to do next.  (On the day I saw Jane Eyre, Fassbender won the Best Actor prize at Venice for Steve McQueen’s Shame.  David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, in which Fassbender plays Jung, screened at Venice too.)

As well as these marvellous young actors, there’s Judi Dench as the Thornfield housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax – a role perhaps a little expanded from the novel once they knew who was going to play it but still not a large one.  To say that she creates a complete character may be saying nothing new about Judi Dench but watching it happen is as much a treat as ever.  She’s able to suggest a whole life in a few moments.   She gets over the idea of a normal, humdrum existence going on year after year at Thornfield, and a suggestion of human warmth in this large, underheated place – but there’s an edge of unease too. Mrs Fairfax seems both part of the house and intimidated by it.  (The film was shot, according to Wikipedia, on various locations, including Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall, but Thornfield develops a strongly integrated identity.)  Judi Dench delineates Mrs Fairfax’s social position and prejudices with extraordinary deftness and precision.  Her three or four punchlines are so perfectly (but unshowily) delivered that you want to applaud.  I wondered too if Dench had in effect taught Mia Wasikowska what can be done with a Yorkshire accent.

Cary Fukunaga’s approach is socially incisive but never heavy-handed.  The children at Lowood School, in their pinafore uniforms and drained of colour, are de-individualised to reinforce our view of them as prisoners.  The servants at Thornfield, preparing for their master’s return, evince a slight excitement that’s counterbalanced by awareness that this means more work for them.   When I read that the film had been shot in mostly natural light, I wondered if this might be ‘realism’ that didn’t amount to much but I was wrong.  The reliance on candles inside Thornfield makes you appreciate how gloomy things must have been indoors before electric light; it also dramatises the house’s secrets in a way that’s both Gothic and strongly believable – you really don’t know what lies around the corner because you can’t see that far.  The movement of Adriano Goldman’s camera round the place emphasises its big, empty spaces and its inscrutability.  Some of the exteriors are highly expressive too – a narrow strip of grass running between the stone of the house and a high hedge on the other side, a befogged grey-green lane beyond.  Fukunaga is himself a cinematographer, as well as a director and writer, and the visual scheme is strongly coherent.  Some of this is obvious enough – a shot of blue sky and blossom when the love between Jane and Rochester is coming into the open.  Some of it is more complex:  Jane eventually returns to the charred hulk of Thornfield in bright sunshine, everything about the place now exposed; then she’s reunited with the blinded Rochester, now in complete darkness.

I’ve read Jane Eyre twice but I don’t know it well enough to be sure how much of the film’s dialogue was written by Charlotte Brontë and how much by Moira Buffini, who did the screenplay.  Whatever, the lines ring true and the actors are able to deliver them in a way that allows us to connect with them, without their seeming ‘too modern’ (Jane Campion and her cast managed the same in Bright Star).   There’s the odd detail that does seem anachronistic, though:  as Richard Mason (Harry Lloyd), Bertha’s brother, is carted off to have his wounds treated, Jane comes out of the house in her nightdress.  A few other things don’t work.  There’s a good moment between Rochester and Blanche Ingram fooling about in a summer house but it’s otherwise hard to see how Jane could believe that Rochester feels anything for Blanche.  He’s too obviously dismissive of her at the party at Thornfield and Imogen Poots, an excellent Jean Ross (aka Sally Bowles) in Christopher and His Kind on television last year, is perhaps too eccentrically pretty to be right for the part.  Rochester’s wife Bertha (Valentina Cervi), when we finally see her, is rather posy – Fukunaga presents her more as an image than as the woman who set fire to her husband’s bedroom and stabbed her brother.

The film runs just two hours and there are some unavoidable elisions in Buffini’s trim script:  Bertha’s keeper Grace Poole (Rosie Cavaliero) counts for little here, and the character of Jane’s beloved friend at Lowood, Helen Burns, is reduced to a very few minutes on screen – although this means that the progress of her terminal TB is relievingly rapid (a couple of coughs and she’s gone) – and the scene of the two young girls in bed together on the night Helen dies is very well done.  It’s hard to tell whether the moisture on the face of Helen (Freya Burns) is sweat or tears, perhaps it’s both.  Simon McBurney is not a subtle actor but, as Mr Brocklehurst, the principal of Lowood and embodiment of institutional religious tyranny, he’s not as crude as he might have been – and his profile gives him a really hateful reptilian quality.   Dario Marianelli’s score always supports, never overpowers what you see on screen.

At the box office/refreshments counter of the Richmond Curzon (I’ll have to start calling it that), there were a young middle-aged couple and their daughter just ahead of me.   I guess the child, wearing a silly woolly hat (on a humid afternoon), was about nine or ten.   She asked her mother, ‘Which one is it?’ – this meant which screen.  The mother explained there was only one screen, that this was an ‘alternative’ cinema.  ‘What does alternative mean?’  ‘It means it shows films that are different … it’s good to be different’.   This struck me as a fine example of ludicrous local pretentiousness:  Jane Eyre is on at the biggest screen of the Odeon too.  But the woman turned out to be right.  This is a different film – unusually conceived and unusually intelligent – and one of the best of the year so far.

10 September 2011