Judi Dench and Mia Wasikowska looking spiffy in bonnets.

(Picture source: Focus Features)

There are as many interpretations of Jane Eyre’s story as there are adaptations. Folks in the same theatre were clearly enjoying the film about a plucky teenager who lived centuries ago. Did they see it as a story about repressed Victorians? A plain Jane love story or a story about convictions and morality?

Welcome to Cary Fukunaga’s version 2011. In the opening, Fukunaga and screenwriter Moira Buffini plunk audiences right in the middle of the novel and begin to tell the story through flashbacks. How original, I thought. We get a clear view of who Jane is: a young unloved girl moving through life searching for acceptance and a larger existence. In what seems initially as a dull governess position, she meets her counterpart of sorts, Mr Rochester, who is looking for some way out of his own predicament. Love no longer has a place in Rochester’s jaded weary state of mind but Jane manages to fan a fire in his cold cruel heart. And then her world starts to open up in ways she cannot imagine or control, her self-respect and inner strength serving as her only guides.

I have to admire Fukunaga for daring to go with a very youthful looking Mia Wasikowska. It adds another layer of truth (aka lecherous factor) to Rochester’s character which past productions had not dared to tread. I first saw Mia in Spencer Susser and David Michôd’s I Love Sarah Jane, a fantastic Australian short where she plays an incredibly strong young teenager living in a zombie war zone. Also loved her in The Kids are All Right. She’s wonderful at unspoken cues which works well for the character Jane who emotes louder than words.

I’m not incredibly thrilled with Fassbender’s Rochester. It’s clear to me that Rochester was played as an emotionally crippled man who ironically becomes physically crippled at the end. I know Fassbender’s capable of so much more and I wonder if it was just a director decision to play Rochester like a one-note instrument. Also Rochester and St John Rivers were needlessly made to be more violent characters onscreen. I felt this was done to dumb down the book. And don’t get me started on the ending. Dismal and short-changed and whole-ly unsatisfying.

Rating: I can’t recommend this movie to fans of the novel. For adaptations done right, watch Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, and Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women.