A Semi-Objective Film Review of Jane Eyre (2011)

Directed by Cary Fukunaga, Jane Eyre (2011) tells the story of a young governess who overcomes her circumstances and falls in love with her mysterious employer. Along with Fukunaga’s direction, the gloomy cinematography conveys the Gothic element of this classic tale particularly in the opening sequence when Jane wanders around the vast landscape leaving us wondering where she is. One minor exception to the Gothic element is the red room which Jane is supposed to believe that her dead Uncle Reed haunts. The red room looks like a tacky sitting room with the sun shining too brightly for a room that is supposed to be a place of punishment.

In my previous post, I note the specific issues that I had with the screenplay. However, I do appreciate the clever use of the flashback structure to compress the novel’s first act (Jane’s childhood) and the third act (Jane’s first few months with the Rivers family). The second act (Jane’s time at Thornfield) remains mostly uninterrupted focusing on the romance between Jane and Mr. Rochester. However, the ending is simply too abrupt to satisfy even those who are not familiar with the novel and simply watching a period romance.

With the version that they are given, Mia Wasikowska does an excellent job in portraying Jane’s strength of conviction and intelligence as well as her shyness and awkwardness. Michael Fassbender does not portray the enigmatic teasing aspect of Rochester’s character especially in the first intellectual discussion scene and in the scene after Bertha attacks her brother. He telegraphs Rochester’s interest in Jane too much in those scenes. However, in the aftermath of the fire, a scene where Rochester should show an attraction for Jane, Fassbender provides the right amount of seduction.



Also, Jamie Bell gives me a new appreciation of the character of St. John Rivers, a character that I do not normally care for in the book and generally despise when watching Jane Eyre. Bell does not play the character as condescending as other actors have done but still maintains the character’s self-righteousness.

If I am in the mood for a highlight reel of Jane Eyre, I will watch this version. But if I want to indulge my novel purist side, I will watch the 1983 BBC miniseries version instead.

Jane Eyre film links:

Official Website

The Enthusiast’s Guide to Jane Eyre Adaptations

Up in the Eyre: Why are there so many movie adaptations of Jane Eyre, and which one is the best?

The Novel Purist Review of Jane Eyre (2011)

I tried. Honest. I told myself that the film is two hours long and that some scenes and lines will be cut and I should accept it as a highlight reel of Jane Eyre. But I couldn’t stop myself from mentally complaining about the omitted lines and scenes. I was extremely critical during my favorite chapters:

Chapter 14 – Jane and Mr. Rochester’s first intellectual discussion

The dialogue began well with Rochester (Michael Fassbender) being intimidating and enigmatic at the part when he asks Jane (Mia Wasikowska) if she finds him handsome and she sharply replies “No sir.” Although they kept the discussion of Rochester’s claim to superiority based on Jane being his paid subordinate, the discussion on how Rochester made use of his time and experience was dwindled down to a few lines thus cutting out intellectual bond that Rochester and Jane form during this conversation. Instead, Fassbender decides that Rochester wants Jane to know that he is interested in her by saying “Possibly: yet why should I, if I can get sweet, fresh pleasure? And I may get it as sweet and fresh as the wild honey the bee gathers on the moor” and “I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.” in a overtly seductive manner instead of in a enigmatically teasing manner. Rochester does not show Jane that he likes her just as a person at this point.

Chapter 23 – the proposal scene

My first thought when I saw that this scene was coming: ”Why is it daytime?! Am I not remembering this correctly because I could’ve sworn this scene happens at night?” So, when I reread the chapter, I did remember that the scene correctly. Why can’t this scene ever be done right? I feel that this scene takes place at night because there’s an underlying darkness to the proposal: Rochester is already married in the eyes of the law. Perhaps the filmmakers felt that shooting the scene in the day will lend a sense of irony. Then there’s the omission of Rochester finding her a situation in Ireland. That piece of information is the key to Jane’s emotional breakdown because the possibility of her leaving Rochester became real. Without it, the scene lacked the emotional highs and lows that it should have.

Chapter 27 – after the reveal of Rochester’s wife

Wasikowska and Fassbender did a good job at portraying Jane’s sense of pity along with her strength of conviction to leave Rochester and Rochester’s desperation to make Jane stay with him especially when he said, “A mere reed she feels in my hand! I could bend her with my finger and thumb. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful creature! And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame.” However, the scene would have more passion if the screenwriter had included these lines:

"Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise--'I will be yours, Mr. Rochester.'"
"Mr. Rochester, I will NOT be yours."
Another long silence.
"Jane!" recommenced he, with a gentleness that broke me down with grief, and turned me stone-cold with ominous terror--for this still voice was the pant of a lion rising--"Jane, do you mean to go one way in the world, and to let me go another?"
"I do."
"Jane" (bending towards and embracing me), "do you mean it now?"
"I do."
"And now?" softly kissing my forehead and cheek.
"I do," extricating myself from restraint rapidly and completely.
"Oh, Jane, this is bitter! This--this is wicked. It would not be wicked to love me."
"It would to obey you."

While I had a laser-like focus on my favorite chapters, there were other lines that I wished the film had included:

When Jane leaves the party after Rochester asks her if she’s depressed and she denies it. Rochester says:

“But I affirm that you are: so much depressed that a few more words would bring tears to your eyes--indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag. If I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a servant passing, I would know what all this means. Well, to-night I excuse you; but understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don't neglect it. Now go, and send Sophie for Adele. Good-night, my--" He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me.

In the film, a servant announces Richard Mason’s arrival. In the book, Mason arrives a few days after this scene.

When Jane leaves for Gateshead:

“Then you and I must bid good-bye for a little while?" [Rochester says.]
"I suppose so, sir."
"And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane? Teach me; I'm not quite up to it."
"They say, Farewell, or any other form they prefer."
"Then say it."
"Farewell, Mr. Rochester, for the present."
"What must I say?"
"The same, if you like, sir."
"Farewell, Miss Eyre, for the present; is that all?"
"Yes?"
"It seems stingy, to my notions, and dry, and unfriendly. I should like something else: a little addition to the rite. If one shook hands, for instance; but no--that would not content me either. So you'll do no more than say Farewell, Jane?"
"It is enough, sir: as much good-will may be conveyed in one hearty word as in many."
"Very likely; but it is blank and cool--'Farewell.'"

This is one of their major bonding moments and it should have not been left out.

The plot point that I cannot believe that they changed was the fact that Jane discovers that the Rivers are her blood relatives thus giving Jane the family she always wanted. In the film, Jane suggests to St. John that he treats her like a sister. While I can guess that the filmmakers decided on this change to make the St. John’s proposal more acceptable to a modern audience, I find it insulting to the audience. Most viewers try to understand that different time periods had different standards for who people can marry. I think that they could have understood that cousins married each other during that time.

My next post will be a more objective film review of Jane Eyre (2011). But I felt it was my duty as a Jane Eyre fan to warn other Jane Eyre fans about the missing lines and scenes. And to say to any aspiring screenwriter/director/producer: STOP MAKING JANE EYRE FEATURE FILM ADAPTATIONS! THE NOVEL ONLY WORKS AS A MINISERIES!

My first Flixist post

Check out my pick for Flixist's Monthly Musings on sound:

Of sound mind: Romeo + Juliet

Novel-to-Film Adaptations: Film vs. TV miniseries

The way I normally discover books is through films. I like a film, discover that it was adapted from a novel, and read it. Then I usually try to watch the film noting the discrepancies and the possible reasons for them. Most of the time, I feel that the novel enhances my film viewing experience. Other times I am left wondering why the director and/or the screenwriter decided to veer off from the novel. And some books are better adapted as a miniseries than as a feature film. I have argued the case for my favorite novel Jane Eyre over at my sister Jessica’s blog. For this entry, I will examine the 1945 feature film adaptation and the 2011 HBO miniseries adaptation of the James M. Cain novel, Mildred Pierce.

I had seen the 1945 film starring Joan Crawford on Turner Classic Movies a few times. I was not aware that it was a novel until I heard about the HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet. Since James M. Cain was known for his hard-boiled crime novels like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, I figured Mildred Pierce would have the same story as the 1945 film. Mildred Pierce’s loafing husband, Monty Beragon, is murdered and the police try to figure out the identity of the murderer. Mildred recounts her life story to the police of being a single mother who became a waitress and later a successful restaurant owner to support her snobby, spoiled, and ungrateful daughter Veda’s upper class lifestyle aspirations. Once Mildred gives Veda the kind of life that Veda has always wanted, Veda repays her by having an affair with Monty. However, Monty does not love Veda and Veda kills him. Mildred tries to cover up Veda’s crime to alleviate the guilt of creating the vicious Veda but Veda ends up in jail.

But I was wrong. In fact, there is no murder in the original novel. Well, I can argue there is a murder of a mother’s love. Mildred Pierce is a character study of a mother who obsessively loves her snobby, spoiled, and vicious daughter Veda. Like the 1945 film, Mildred becomes a waitress and later on a restaurant owner to give Veda to have the upper class life that Mildred had always wanted. And yet Veda scorns her mother’s working class success. When Veda becomes a successful coloratura soprano, how does she thank her mother for all the years of love, devotion, and sacrifice? By sleeping with her mother’s husband, Monty, of course. And Veda does not pay. She deceives Mildred one last time and goes her merry way to New York. Mildred makes a vow to never let Veda into her life again.

One of the factors that works in the miniseries’ favor is time. The first element of time is the year. The 1945 film had to deal with the Production Code which outlawed explicit mentions and depictions of infidelity and sexuality which permeate the novel. The murder was created so that those who were deemed immoral (Monty and Veda) would be punished for their affair and Mildred gets all the admiration for maintaining her dignity. In the scene where Mildred (Joan Crawford) catches Monty (Zachary Scott) with Veda (Ann Blyth), Mildred looks briefly at Veda as Veda says that she is glad that Mildred now knows. We see Mildred’s shock over the discovery fighting back tears. However, Mildred’s anger is more focused on Monty than Veda. Mildred tries to pull the gun on Monty but Monty convinces her to drop it. So Mildred scurries in tears.

In the novel, Mildred is not completely dignified when she discovers Monty and Veda’s affair. The 2011 miniseries allows the scene where Mildred discovers Monty and Veda together to play out in its naked (pun intended) agony. As Mildred (Kate Winslet) watches Veda (Evan Rachel Wood) strut across the room mocking her mother with her naked body, Mildred sees her idealized self that she poured her sweat and tears into creating and the thankless daughter who betrayed her. Mildred strangles Veda trying to destroy the creature that she helped to create because the ideal version of Mildred that she wanted Veda to be would never do something like this.

The second element of time is length. Would a faithful adaptation of the novel work in a feature film format? Perhaps. But then again, the characters would have to be oversimplified in order to fit in a two hour time frame. We would not see Mildred as a capable business woman who was incapable of seeing the snake-like monster that she created in Veda, for some of the scenes concerning Mildred’s restaurants would have been cut. We would see Monty as simply a willing loaf as opposed a loaf who wanted to be loved by Mildred and not for what he can do for her. We would only see Veda as rotten to her core instead of questioning whether she was a product of her mother’s smothering love or not. With a novel like this, the length of time is important to explore the toxic mother/daughter relationship that Mildred and Veda have and to feel Mildred’s despair every time she thinks she has Veda’s love only to have Veda take it away from her.

Because I had started reading the novel after the first two episodes aired and finished it before the last two episodes, I had more of an open mind than I do with Jane Eyre. My one disappointment in the miniseries adaptation is the ending. The original ending gave you the idea that Mildred finally understood the viciousness of her daughter and she was truly, completely done with Veda. However, the ending that the miniseries chose seems to suggest that even though Mildred says she’s done with Veda, if Veda were to come back, Mildred would take her back in a heartbeat.

Next Wednesday, April 27, 2011, at 8:00 P.M. I will be hosting up a twitter chat (#filmchat) via my Twitter @sherryrose80 about film vs. miniseries adaptations. The following questions will be discussed:

Have you read the book before you saw the film?
Have you seen a film, read the book, and then see a film again?
If so, did reading the book change your view of the film?
How do you feel when the film changes the ending from the book?
Would all books benefit from a miniseries format or are there any books that it would be impossible to do so?

I hope you can come and chat. I look forward to hearing from you.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lady in White on Tennessee Williams’s Boulevard of Broken Homosexual Dreams

Elizabeth Taylor (1932- 2011) was known as a breathtakingly beautiful actress who portrayed both smoldering sexuality and unhinged fragility. These qualities are best exemplified in the film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Williams’s plays are known for the broken dream and the heartbreaking effects on facing reality on those who cannot face reality. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer, the broken dream is the virile heterosexual man that people believe Brick and Sebastian to be. Elizabeth Taylor plays the character who makes the characters see the homosexual men and the destructive nature of their desire. In these moments she is dressed in white.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Here, Taylor plays Maggie the Cat, a woman trying desperately to get her husband into their marriage bed. However, Brick (Paul Newman) is consumed by his grief over the death of his friend, Skipper. Due to the Hollywood Production Code, the homosexual relationship had to be implied. The white dresses she wears throughout the film suggest the purity of heterosexual desire. She tells Brick “Maggie the Cat is alive! I’m alive!” to emphasize that his friend Skipper is dead so his homosexual desire should be dead as well. She tries to get Brick to talk about his desire for Skipper even when Brick tells Big Daddy that Maggie had sex with Skipper out of revenge.

Later in the film, Maggie proclaims, “The truth, the truth! Everybody keeps hollering about the truth. Well, the truth is as dirty as lies!” Although the truth in this scene was Big Daddy’s cancer diagnosis, it can also mean the truth that Maggie has to lie about her pregnancy in order for Brick to face the fact that he cannot live as a homosexual male.

Suddenly, Last Summer

In this film, Taylor plays Catherine Holly who is traumatized by the death of her cousin, Sebastian Venable. Her aunt has put her in a mental institution and insists that Catherine get a lobotomy because everyone else wants to remember their version of Sebastian, a good man who liked to write poetry in the summer. For most of the film, Catherine wears dark colors showing the darkness of ignoring the truth. In the film’s climatic scene, Catherine, dressed in white and seated in a white chair, tells everyone the truth that they do not want to hear while under a truth serum. Using heterosexual desire to bring about homosexual pleasure, Sebastian made Catherine wear a white bathing suit to bait young boys. However, those young boys eventually turn on Sebastian and kill him in a cannibalistic fashion. Once the truth is revealed, Catherine is at peace.

In both films, Elizabeth Taylor shows that she was the perfect actress to convey Williams’s strong yet fragile object of heterosexual desire.

For more information on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer:

IMDB site for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Turner Classic Movies articles on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

IMDB site for Suddenly, Last Summer

Turner Classic Movies articles on Suddenly, Last Summer

Shall We Tango?

 

My favorite dance to watch is the tango whether in a film or on the TV show Dancing with the Stars. I see the tango as the dance of pent-up passion that is slowly being released as the dancers pull into each other and then push away to the slow/fast pace of the music. Films centered around the world of ballroom dancing such as often feature the tango along with the rhumba to convince reluctant students that ballroom dancing can be sexy. However, the tango sequences in film that I enjoy watching are the ones that do not involve the dance studio.

My favorite tango sequence is the “El Tango de Roxanne” sequence from Moulin Rouge (2001). At this point in the film, the courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman) agrees to spend the night with The Duke (Richard Roxburgh) to save the production of Spectacular Spectacular, a show written by her penniless poet lover, Christian (Ewan McGregor). Although Christian knows that Satine is trying to help him, he feels conflicted. The tango dancers dancing to the rearrangement of The Police classic “Roxanne” help to depict his subconscious imaginings of Satine with The Duke. While the background dancers display the passion that Christian has for Satine, the two main dancers’ actions depict the betrayal that Christian imagines Satine committing while seducing The Duke. Though Christian may know that Satine does not love The Duke, he cannot help wondering if the fake passion she shows The Duke now might turn into real passion later.

In addition to the music and the dancing, what makes this sequence fascinating is the use of lighting. With Christian, the red symbolizes the warm, free-spirit of the bohemian life. Notice that the windmill of the Moulin Rouge, the place where bohemians seeking “truth, freedom, and above all things, love,” is lit in red. Also, red, as the color associated with the heart and love, shows that Christian loves Satine from his heart. Unlike Christian, The Duke, lit in blue, displays the coldness of the aristocracy who understands love as a material possession. In his tower, he tries to seduce Satine with an intricate diamond necklace, thus covering her with ice. Once he realizes that he cannot possess her heart, he rips the necklace and proceeds to possess her body. Notice that toward the end of the sequence Christian is in blue while screaming “Roxanne” suggesting that he has now indulged in the same cold jealousy as The Duke.

Another tango sequence that I have discovered recently comes from Easy Virtue (2008). In this scene, John (Ben Barnes) has discovered that his American wife Larita (Jessica Biel) was on trial for the murder of her first husband. He is upset with her for lying to him. Larita, a city girl, has been struggling under the strict confines of the English countryside clashing constantly with John’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). John’s father, played by Colin Firth, understands Larita’s need to get out of the estate as he had refused to return home after the war. Here the dance is not releasing a romantic pent-up passion but a passion for being true to oneself. Larita knows that she can never fit into John’s country estate world. And John’s father never had an attachment to the estate either. The dance symbolizes their joint need for freedom from the stifling conventions of country estate living. It also shows John’s mother’s hypocrisy since she has been bothered by her husband’s past indiscretions yet she fully supports him dancing with Larita if it means that John will see Larita as an unscrupulous woman unworthy to be his wife.



Unfortunately, this clip does not show the whole tango from the film. However, I did find a fanvid that shows the whole tango (although a slowed down version) with the instrumental version of “El Tango de Roxanne,” which was a happy coincidence for me. So I thought I would include here as an example of how music and context can influence the reading of a scene. Seeing it on YouTube without any knowledge of the film, the clip shows the uninformed viewer Jessica Biel’s character seducing Colin Firth’s character.



For more information about the tango or to see a list of films featuring the tango, click here.

Welcome to my blog!

I'm Sherry.  I have always loved watching films all my life.  As I grew older, I realized that I loved learning about them as well. Then I realized that I wanted to write about them as a career.  I received my second bachelor's degree in Film Studies.  As I am contemplating my graduate school options, I decided to start my own film blog.

The title of my blog comes from a line from one of my favorite films, Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love, because I feel that most of the time films are remembered by moments.  These moments are restless because something is always moving be it the camera, the character, or even the viewer.  So I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts on film moments.  

In the meantime, check out my film studies posts:

My French New Wave Film Blog: Life As A Film

My Post on Primo Amore (2004) at the Italian Film Blog

I have also written guest posts at my sister's Jessica's blog (Healthy Obsessions of a Girly Tomboy):

Black Swan (2010)

Jane Eyre (2011)

In the Mood for Love (2000)