If it had a little more gumption–a little more of the pluck and resolve of the novel’s title character–the A&E cable network could have done the definitive “Jane Eyre.”
Being able to make such a claim for its version, starring Ciaran Hinds and Samantha Morton and debuting Sunday at 7 p.m., would be no small achievement. The novel that you should have read in an English class in school, or in a book club or on holiday since, has proved as resistant to being captured on film as novelist Charlotte Bronte was to the love-is-all propaganda of the Romantic movement.
The best prior film version, the 1944 edition starring Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester, had energy in its pacing and in Welles’ performance, so theatrical that he might have been playing Mr. New York instead. But it made the governess to Rochester’s young French ward too plain a Jane by half. Joan Fontaine was milquetoast, impossible to believe as a romantic match for the cape-twirling lord of the manor.
There have been other “Eyres,” as well, that failed to capture the head vs. heart dichotomy, the grand Gothic passions and hidden horrors and the Cinderella storyline that have won the archetypal novel generations of passionate fans since it was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell.
Last year’s try, from director Franco Zeffirelli, cast William Hurt as Rochester and droopy French person Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jane; it was more pretty than passionate and ultimately dragged like a two-legged horse.
So news that A&E was putting on “Eyre” stirred anticipation in English lit majors everywhere. In recent years the American cable station has made, with British partners, a strong version of Jane Austen’s “Emma” and a shimmering, spellbinding, note-perfect “Pride and Prejudice.”
With “Jane Eyre” it comes very close to carving its initials in the book’s famous chestnut tree. It does get the most important thing–the life-essence of the romantic leads and an organically pulsing relationship between them–exactly right. For that alone it is a very good movie.
But it also makes an essential miscalculation. When Jane had to choose whether to defy her convictions to live with the married man she loved, she could not. When A&E had to choose whether to trust in Bronte’s tale by devoting two nights of airtime and the necessary funds to commit it all to film, it proved to have less rectitude.
Its version clocks in at just one night and 110 minutes–almost the same length as the 1996 feature film,–which makes for a movie that rushes through some key moments in the story and ignores others altogether.
Jane’s horrid childhood, in the house of a cruel aunt and then at the crueler Lowood School, is dispensed with in a heartbeat, although her great cheeky line about how little girls avoid hellfire (“I must keep in very good health, and not die”) remains. The portentious lightning splitting of the chestnut, as Rochester and Jane declare their love for one another, is ignored, as are her later surprise inheritance, her revealing unwillingness to forgive her dying aunt even as she nursed her and the book’s most famous line: “Reader, I married him.”
And the post-Rochester relationship with the young missionary St. John–who wants to marry Jane for the noblest, and blandest, of reasons–gets short shrift, thus robbing the story of some of its potency in exploring the notion of love as an intellectual and considered thing versus a passionate and reckless one.
These subtractions–the screenplay is by Kay Mellor (“Band of Gold”) and the direction by Robert Young (“Fierce Creatures”)–are especially painful because what is not left out is left in so well.
Hinds, Captain Wentworth from “Persuasion,” sheds his hunky boy image, becoming a bit beastly with the simple display of mutton-chop sideburns and unruly long hair (determinedly shaggy Wicker Park boys, take note). His desperate, tormented Rochester, though, is a magnetic presence, willful and boorish, alternately self satisfied and self loathing, but with humor and veiled affection for Jane stumbling about beneath his gruff commands.
Morton, so strong as the heroine’s working-class project Harriet Smith in A&E’s “Emma,” is, finally, a Jane Eyre who has the spine and smart-alecky edge of the character in the novel. Of course Rochester tumbles for this woman who speaks of her low station but clearly believes herself the equal of the well-bred ladies whose company Rochester also keeps,
When she confesses her love for him even as she turns a cold eye to cataloguing his faults, you understand, watching this new “Jane Eyre,” exactly what she means.
– “Homicide, Sweet Homicide”: With those words from Det. Bayliss (Kyle Secor), TV’s best drama, NBC’s “Homicide: Life of the Street,” returns to the lineup Friday (9 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5) with the vigorous first of a three-part episode.
A few old characters are out and some promising new ones in: The episode lays it all out cleverly and clearly enough that I needn’t repeat it here.
The main story through the three parts is a rich one. James Earl Jones plays a prominent philanthropist in Baltimore’s black community whose Haitian housekeeper is found murdered on the night of a dinner in his honor. Racial tension divides the murder police as Pembleton and Giardello try to protect Jones’ character, while white detectives argue he should be treated as a suspect.
