Tags
Jane Eyre (2011) – Art 1/5 Ent 1/5 Worth 5/5
I’m glad I watched this movie. I’m glad, because on the one hand, it was a very decent movie, and on another it validates my point that a movie could be inartful and boring, yet worth the experience. Reproducing Victorian novels to be corset dramas doesn’t require much imagination, and in fact, a lot of people will get mad at you if you ‘update’ Charlotte Bronte in any way. So you’ve got a movie whose concepts and narrative are stuck in a world that would find our current culture and even the possibilities of artistic expression in cinema to be inconceivable. It doesn’t really work, does it? Well, it passes on account of the great writing and acting behind the movie. There’s nothing “wrong” with this movie whatsoever, and it transports you to a different time by consciously ignoring all artistic development since then. I’ve seen a number of different adaptions, and almost all of them are the same. Little separates this Jane Eyre from the 2006 mini-series with Toby Stephens, the 1996 film with Charlotte Gainsbourg, and the 1983 mini-series with Timothy Dalton. They all have varying qualities of acting, but no deviations into the incomprehensible, absurd or distasteful. I probably like this one the most, because the filmmaking process has become more professional and clean, and both lead actors perform marginally better than their predecessors.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1229822/
