Unoriginal Sin: The Downfall of Film? Part 4

 

The new pointless rehashing of Charlotte Brontë’s classic prides itself on its innovative jumbling up of the storyline, first showing us Jane staggering tearfully out of the grounds of Thornfield, and then going back to fill out the details via Jane’s sudden and severe flashback attacks. What was obviously conceived as a way to skim over certain passages and stretch the love affair out to cover the film’s entire duration ends up shooting itself in the foot, in that it involves the complete destruction of almost everything likeable about Jane Eyre. She mopes around self piteously and mentally detached from her surroundings; totally inappropriate for a character supposedly so practical, active and deeply observant of others. 

Screenwriter Moira Buffini’s scrambling for a new and modern way to tell this story was never destined for success. Her adaption suppresses everything Gothic and extreme in accordance with modern tastes; the scene in which Bertha Mason tears Jane’s wedding veil in two was shot but cut because it was incongruous with the mood of the film. 

Rochester’s been through the same mill as Heathcliff and come out the other end a loveable rogue, rather than unnerving and unreadable. With the muting of the novel’s Gothic elements we lose all its complementary forms of passion — repulsion, fear, guilt, sexuality and morality — and Mia Wasikowska’s blank and bland Jane joins all the other passive, gormless heroines on our screens waiting to be mastered, usually by vampires. With no convincing anger coming from Jane, the film’s efforts at violence and harshness fall flat. There’s no sense of the imagination which gives rise to her drawings, or the intelligence which in the book leads her to speculate about the source of the strange goings-on at Thornfield. She encounters scenes of arson and physical maiming with the same meek and bizarrely uncurious attitude.

Robert Stevenson’s 1943 version (starring Orson Welles opposite Jane Fontaine) is melodrama, but at least it strives towards a psychological landscape, rather than a decorous Sunday-night period drama formula with an emotionally neutralising string soundtrack. Perhaps this is a novel which simply doesn’t work as film; we need Jane’s internality to work out what’s going on behind her control and her careful expression, and visually that’s hard to get at. Nonetheless the robotic replication of scenes we’ve seen before is a crime in itself, and a depressing lookout on how producers are trying to capitalise on this property.