Jane Eyre: Review By Julian Left

Jane Eyre is such a common name in movie history. So many adaptations of the novel have been made and so many different portrayals of this troubled character but this is a tremendous result concerning both the accuracy and the execution of the story. This film is a cinematic piece that feels like a novel. It's lovely, peaceful, thoughtful but most of all silent. By silence I mean invisibility. It's a colorless but odored film.

After spending cold and harsh times under the administration of a stark boarding school where she was sent by her aunt Sarah (Sally Hawkins) after her parents died of typhus, Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) finds herself working as a governess for Adle Varens (Romy Settbon Moore), the ward of Edward Fairfax Rochester (Michael Fassbender), master of Thornfield Hall. Dealing with her own dark cornered past, with her disciplined and compassionate personality, Jane finds home and warm under the Rochester roof. She gets an immense pleasure and a certain amount of happiness knowing that the charming Edward Rochester looks at her with desire and passion and equality. She reaches brightness once she's asked for wife. The love story appears to become full and untouchable, almost as gracious as a fairy tale. Her poisonous past is gone and now she's a young woman in front of taking decisions that will change her life completely: from poor, obscure, plain and little to rich, consp*cuous, complex and big. But when's she's about to put the big veil she must face a secret that might get her more disappointed than ever. The love story becomes futile and disturbing. For her, her fate seems to be a nature's catastrophe. However, she's not a woman to fear the attempts of destiny to discourage someone's choice for a future so she takes matters in her own hands. She becomes mature and sterile to naivety. While fighting her own demons she becomes reluctant to her own sudden life changing news. She'll find herself in an opposite position from the beginning, eating from different dishes from the beginning, meeting the opposite man she once met but dealing with the same problems regarding love and life. She's young, colorless but filled with meaning like one of her own paintings.

Though I'm not very found of Mia Wasikowska, I admit she probably portrays the best Jane Eyre ever. She's deep and she feels the connection with her character. She identifies with it and she deals with her emotional progress. Michael Fassbender is one of the best actors out there right now, but his performance here felt chained. I felt he was sometimes just conventional and other times he passed that scale greatly. I'm more interested in his work in Shame and A Dangerous Method. The chemistry between these two was pretty good because I barely had any problem seeing them together interact the way they did. The good acting was accompanied by a very good cinematography that suffered only at times by being too pale. The editing was simple but on point. The music by Dario Marianelli did not felt as vibrant as it should. It was too melancholic and dreamy like even for a grey atmosphere like this one.

Jane Eyre is one of the good movie of 2011 but it becomes fragile once you're done with it. You might even forget it if you're not a big fan of the novel. But don't get mushy about it because I gave enough reasons for you to see it and judge it for yourself.

Storyline/Dialogue: 7,5/10

Acting: 8/10

Techincal Execution: 7,6/10

Replay Value: 7/10

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Overall: 7,6