Jane Eyre - review

There have been plenty of films made of Jane Eyre, dating right back to the silent era.

The most famous version, with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles as Mr Rochester, appeared in 1944; another, with George Scott and Susannah York, in 1970; another, with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, in 1996.

There have been numerous BBC TV adaptations too, at least one a decade over the past 50 years, in 1963, 1973, 1983 (Timothy Dalton as Rochester), 1997 (Ciarán Hinds as Rochester, Samantha Morton as Jane) and again in 2006 (Toby Stephens as Rochester, Ruth Wilson as Jane). Now here is Jane Eyre once more - again in a co-production with BBC Films.

Overkill, surely? But perhaps not. Perhaps we need our adaptations of Jane Eyre and other classics updated constantly because they are always of their own time and little able to last outside it.

Making adaptations is like faking an Old Master, as, say, Hans van Meegeren did with Vermeer in the Thirties. At the time of their making such fakes can readily pass as authentic because the contemporary elements, being part of the surrounding culture, are not obvious or discordant.

But after a surprisingly short time they no longer look at all like authentic creations from the original period and their anachronisms leap out - unmistakeably revealing them as products of their own brief era, technically, stylistically, sometimes even spiritually.

So maybe we do need to keep on remaking the classics relentlessly. For while the original can be both of its own time and timeless, secondary adaptations are so perishable they might as well come with a "best before" date.

The new Jane Eyre is notably well-made in almost every respect and should you want to watch an adaptation of the story just now, highly recommendable.

The settings are superb - Haddon Hall in Derbyshire making a grand Thornfield. The script is by the playwright Moira Buffini, who did such a neat job on Posy Simmonds's Tamara Drewe. She has skilfully kept all the most memorable lines without letting the dialogue as a whole feel antiquated, and has deftly and unobjectionably rejigged the whole structure to prevent a predictably straight chronological progression, as in the novel.

We first see Jane fleeing over the stormy moors, after running away from Mr Rochester and Thornfield, to be taken in and have her life saved by the clergyman St John Rivers and his sisters - an incident reached only two-thirds of the way through the book. From here, her life unfolds in extended flashback - her mistreatment by her cruel aunt Mrs Reed (Sally Hawkins, quite terrifying), her dreadful time at the charity school Lowood, and her passion for her employer, Mr Rochester.

Cary Joji Fukunaga - known previously for his violent, prize-winning Spanish- language gang thriller Sin Nombre, and aged only 34 - directs.

The style is fluent and low-key, shot mostly in available light. This makes for a muted tone - the interiors are sinisterly dark and shadowy, the exteriors grey and misty without ever being over-rhetorical.

Fukunaga has an excellent sense of people acting powerfully on each other while remaining within themselves, together but alone, trying to belong, which has transferred naturally from his gang thriller. Where he fails to rise to the occasion, though, is in the climactic set pieces - the revelation of raving Bertha Mason, the reunion of the lovers - which continue at pretty much the same level as every other scene.

Judi Dench turns in stout work as Mrs Fairfax and Jamie Bell is surprisingly touching, even appealing, as the over-pious St John Rivers. Simon McBurney makes a perfectly horrid schoolmaster Mr Brocklehurst and Imogen Poots glitters darkly as Jane's rival, Blanche Ingram.

Both Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester and Mia Wasikowska as Jane are far better looking than the parts require. Charlotte Brontë was convinced her own looks were "something almost repulsive" and Jane Eyre, she emphasised, was "small and plain", while Rochester is "neither tall nor graceful" with "grim mouth, chin and jaw". Never mind. While we prefer a more realistic filming style these days it seems average or below-average looks in our heroes and heroines are just not on.

Fassbender - shortly to be enjoyed full-frontal as a New York sex addict in Steve McQueen's Shame - has the necessary opacity for the role, which has never made any sense if you think about it for long. He's fierce, unyielding, locked into himself, intense, capricious and bad-tempered - a force.

As Jane, Mia Wasikowska (just 21, a natural beauty, previously Tim Burton's Alice) is great.

She has made herself pale and severe (if not actually ugly), supremely self-disciplined. Yet however much she curbs herself you know just what is surging inside, how unbreakable is her spirit.

Perhaps she's the best Jane Eyre on film, for Wasikowska manages to be both a specific character and completely archetypal, just as Jane is in the novel - that deranged, overwhelming and, it now seems, inexhaustible creation.

Jane Eyre
Cert: PG