Film Review: Jane Eyre

Rating: 7.8/10 - Very Good

Another film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. However this latest adaptation does this classic novel true justice.



Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga. Screenplay: Moira Buffini (Based on the novel "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte) Producer: Alison Owen and Paul Trijbits. Executive Producers: Christine Langan. Editor: Melanie Oliver. Cinematographer: Adriano Goldman. Score: Dario Marianelli. Distributor: Focus Features. Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Judi Dench. Age Restriction: 10M. Running Time: 118 Minutes.

It is an intensely intriguing and intricate depiction of Eyre’s life and unscathed character. Themes of love, solitude and self determination are played against one another. However these are only some of the many emotionally driven themes which echoes throughout this eerie, melancholic - yet hopeful meadow in which Jane Eyre’s pure and passionate ambition lingers.

With a very striking and loaded start, the film launches the viewer into Eyre’s perspective, immediately creating an empathetic link towards one of the many unjustly treated women during the Victorian Era; England. Yet Jane Eyre has something different and haunting about her. She is introduced to the viewer as a young and serenely innocent Victorian girl, however the viewer is quickly scolded for any preconceived ideas about this supposedly passive girl. A slightly different characteristic epitomizes Eyre’s person. As the young Jane is taunted by a cousin she startles him with a shower of unexpected blows. What renders this behavior extremely important is the fact that she does not heed to patriarchal hierarchy, or in that respect, any unequally granted power that was then so easily put upon equally undeserving people in higher ‘rankings’. Unlike most other Victorian women in the previously popular film adaptations of Victorian novels, where the women shamefully bore their feminine woe’s, Eyre is shown as a different type of Victorian women who was just as discriminated against. Yet Eyre knows her ‘destiny’ lies beyond any horizon ‘man’ could ever see. This ambition leads her and she follows it intuitively, yet weeping she tears herself from any situation in which her spirit could even be remotely subdued or captured.

Questions such as the patriarchal hierarchies still present in marriages and relationships are subtly underlined between the lines of a strangely familiar melancholic landscape. This landscape is an extremely important symbol from which Eyre’s emotions are intensified throughout the film. as the seasons and nature change, Eyre’s experiences and surrounding emotional landscape shifts and sheds accordingly.

An extremely intense yet immensely determined film, as is the described character of the women that was described by Charlotte Bronte as Jane Eyre. This film carries many truths and does not leave the viewer desolate nor idealistically hopeful. One leaves the cinema, maybe shedding a final tear but as life deals its blows the tears are more often evaporated before the next handful of ‘life’ is abruptly thrown your way — as the seasons transitionally fade into each other, yet somewhere in the middle of it one realizes that a season has gone, a new one has come and is almost past again.

Verdict: A slight bit over romantic and melodramatic, yet the focus is definitely for a specific audience who knows what they’re letting themselves into. However extreme beauty nevertheless keeps the viewer drenched in tears and a strangely intimate and Gothic intrigue.

Jane Eyre is out in theatres now.