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Jane Eyre
Commonweal, June 1, 1996 by Richard Alleva
The latest screen version of Jane Eyre, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, has pace, sufficient atmosphere, and generally good acting. But it also conveys a feeling of second-handedness that truly first-rate adaptations avoid. Rather than rediscovering Charlotte Bronte's vision of revolt against societal tyranny, the director seems to be packaging our fond old memories of the Gothic romance we now take Jane Eyre to be, though the 1847 novel was never intended as a genre piece. The unconventionality of the heroine and the tormented unscrupulousness of Rochester (whose near-bigamy may be immoral but is also an attempt to restore love and sanity to his life) shocked many of its first readers. That power to shock isn't in this movie. The years have subdued the impact of the novel, and this new rendering doesn't wash away the pleasant patina of a century-and-a-half's acceptance. Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre feels like an instant classic: smooth, confident of our approval, a little dull.
How could it be otherwise? How could we, having experienced the latest developments of the women's movement and all manner and combinations of sexuality-in-revolt, still be shocked by a story of an intelligent woman who claims her rights as a moral being? Isn't self-assertion something now so accepted that only self-abasement is likely to raise eyebrows (as with those TV movies and talk shows about women who refuse to leave their battering husbands)?
Well, a classic is only a classic until you start reading it. Then it disturbs; then it may still shock.
Take the opening scenes of book and movie, which deal with the oppressed existence of the orphaned Jane in a household of cruel relatives. The movie, of course, must synopsize, but look at the incident that the adaptors (Zeffirelli and British playwright Hugh Whitemore) choose to epitomize little Jane's response to her mistreatment. We see her roughed up by the vicious little beasts who are her cousins and thrust into a closet where she turns round and round in helpless bewilderment. It's a pathetic enough image but it's also exactly the sort of thing we expect in any movie about an orphan. And getting exactly what we want doesn't rouse us.
Open the book and what a surprise! Little Jane is indeed baited by her beastly male cousin, and what does the helpless little girl-child do? Why, she pounces upon the much larger boy and proceeds to beat the daylights out of him. This is how Jane Eyre's independence of mind and spirit first manifests itself--as sheer physical wrath, as scratching and biting, as animal revolt. To picture a female child behaving this way (imagine Dickens's Little Nell reacting so fiercely!) must have been the first of many shocks for the novel's early readers, but the movie substitutes easygoing pathos for that shock.
Or take a much later episode. Jane has learned of Rochester's mad wife and her dreams of marital happiness have been shattered. She leaves her lover's estate. The movie's Jane, of course, drives away in a carriage with all her baggage aboard. I say "of course" because we who have watched "Masterpiece Theater" episodes are used to images of distraught heroines being hustled off in broughams. Nothing unusual there. But turn to the novel and your jaw drops. There, Jane leaves, yes, but on foot and with nothing but the clothes on her back, abandoning herself to the inclemencies of weather and the doubtful civility of anyone she encounters on the road. Her departure is radical in its rejection of Rochester, of hope, of propriety, and (since it's an act of great peril) almost of life itself. When Jane revolts she goes all the way. She's an extremist heroine of an extremist book. But Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre acts moderately and mousily.
This moderation and mousiness is reinforced by the director's casting and direction of Anna Paquin and Charlotte Gainsbourg as, respectively, the child and adult Jane. Paquin, spontaneous and expressive in The Piano, is so overdirected by Zeffirelli that you can sense the director signaling to her from the other side of the camera--"Move your head a little to the left, carissima! Now think sad thoughts! Cry! Cry!" The effect hardly conveys the impression of a girl trying to be true to her own nature.
You can see why Zeffirelli cast Charlotte Gainsbourg. She is homely in an interesting way, self-contained, somewhat elfin (Rochester to Jane: "Oh, Jane, you strange, unearthly thing!"), and the line of her mouth is a fascinating scribble. But appearance can never take the place of performance in the case of a major dramatic role. Her performance is absolutely static. Gainsbourg speaks in the same monotone from beginning to end, even in the later scenes where Jane is supposed to be a self-possessed, more assertive woman. When the actress reads the last line of the film--"Our happiness is complete"--Gainsbourg sounds as if she were announcing funeral arrangements. Nor is the monotony purely vocal. When Rochester looks at Jane in her bridal gown and exclaims on her new beauty, no sense of freshly discovered womanliness or nascent sexuality emanates from Gainsbourg. Jane Eyre is meant to be subdued, not squashed.
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