Movie review: "Jane Eyre" (1996)
William Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Director: Franco Zeffirelli
Based on the book Jane Eyre by Charlotte
Bronte
112 minutes
A quick scan on IMDB.com turns up more than two dozen screen versions
of Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre. This
version, with a subdued William Hurt as Mr. Rochester, and a startling, demure
Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jane Eyre, is worth watching a
second time.
If you’re reading this, you may think you know the story, and how it
ends. Let’s agree on this: from our modern vantage point, if we discovered a
previously unknown Charlotte Bronte novel, I don’t think it would be difficult
to guess the general storyline and character development. Not to say that this
makes Bronte uninteresting or unexceptional—I think you can best appreciate and
enjoy Bronte if you know what you’re getting into, if you can bring an openness
to deeply personal, individual human drama to your reading.
Any movie version is an abbreviation. I think this one brings Bronte’s
protagonists to life in a steadily stronger crescendo of the tragic and
fortuitous experiences of two lives that are, at first, on grimly divergent
paths, and, finally, reach a happy convergence that literally strikes the
sparks of love in the ashes of Thornfield Hall.
For me, the romance of Jane Eyre
is, of course, the storybook love of Edward, master of Thornfield, and Jane,
the governess, but the love story ebbs and flows, and, for me, there is a
concurrent theme that is equally satisfying.
I am drawn to the stark reality of the separate lives of Mr. Rochester
and Jane Eyre, and their gritty willingness to endure that reality, even as
they yearn and yearn for the improbably better lives that they profoundly
imagine. Right up to very end, they don’t know how it’s going to turn out.
No comments:
Post a Comment