1 Star
His first film, “Sin Nombre,” was so captivating and resonant that it landed a spot on Dive’s Top Ten Movies of 2009. Compared to that kind of start, director Cary Fukunaga’s second stab at the big screen, an adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” is a massive disappointment.
This is a movie without a wind up, starting the story almost at the end and revealing in one long flashback how Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) goes from neglected orphan to mishandled charity case to beloved governess to wronged fiancée to moorland runaway. Never once does it justify its framing technique with anything that could come close to explaining the necessity of that time jump.
Same goes for the fantasies that sometimes pop up in Jane’s life, last for a few frames and are then corrected again in the natural flow of the film. It’s a bewildering subjunctive tense without a corresponding conjugation. Where Fukunaga’s last movie flowed with a lyrical yet penetrating grammar of pictures and characters, this one feels totally out of touch with the mechanics of cinematic storytelling.
The most unbearable problem with “Jane Eyre,” though, is also the most ironic — in one of the quintessential romance stories in the English-language, a tale of love so passionately Gothic that it would make the bloodless Jane Austen wet her knickers, the principle actors never manage to get more aroused than a plate of soggy biscuits. Wasikowska as Eyre and Michael Fassbender as Edward Rochester both have the will, but when it comes to convincing the audience, there’s just no way. The performances are so hollow that when Rochester tells Jane “It is your soul that I want,” one can almost hear him deflate with the effort.
Between the clumsy unfolding of the plot, the awkward acting and the disappointment of Fukunaga’s sophomore effort, this is one production I wish had gotten lost out on the heath and never turned back up.
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
