Watched the new "Jane Eyre" movie again tonight when I wasn't so tired. Excellent. I even teared up at the end. I'd like to see the "director's cut." (Sorry for the flashes in the photos below.)
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| Rochester distraught over Jane's decision not to reside at Thornfield as his mistress. |
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| Jane tracks down Rochester after his crazy wife, Bertha, burns down Thornfield and commits suicide. Here he's blind after being injured in the fire while trying to save Bertha, who jumped to her death from the burning building. (She thought she could fly.) (In the book, Rochester eventually recovers his sight.) |
I've seen one or maybe two movie adaptations of Charlotte Brontë's book. I watched the 1943 adaption right after I'd read the book - the one with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as Rochester (and a very young Elizabeth Taylor as Helen Burns) - and was disappointed. I much prefer the casting in this version, with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. I think it's truer to Brontë's description of her characters.
I also thought Jamie Bell was a good choice for St. John (although the whole part about St. John in the novel bored me) (all the religious crap). But I liked that part as recreated in the movie - as a springboard for Jane's flashbacks to her past. And I liked Moira Buffini's script, too. She has St. John telling Jane: "Why have you not crushed this lawless passion?" after Jane tells him she's plainly not interested in being his wife.
I'd like to watch the director's cut just to see whether there's more to the ending. (I won't give away the movie's ending here, which I thought was perfect as it was.) In the final chapter of the book, narrated by Brontë in the first person, Jane begins with: "Reader, I married him."
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| Haddon Hall, in Derbyshire, England, used as the set for Thornfield in the movie |
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