A Girl Has Got To Do What A Girl Has Got To Do-19th Century-Style- “Jane Eyre” –A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the latest film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

DVD Review

Jane Eyre, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, 2011.

Okay, okay I will freely confess that as a boy I did not, I steadfastly did not, read a girls’ book, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. And I did not, as we live a confessional age, read her sisters’ books or even, damned to hell, Jane Austen’s stuff. And you would not have either (or at least not have said so publicly) any place near my corner boys society growing up absurd in the 1950s old North Adamsville neighborhood. See you either didn’t read, and made a big virtues out of it preferring chasing cars and girls, or for those like my corner boy, Frankie Larkin, and me, who did we read mad Jack Kerouac, or besotted Scott Fitzgerald, or best of all, the max daddy mad adventurer Ernest Hemingway. Period.

Moreover if we didn’t read guy novelists then we were crazy (and make that I was crazy) for history books. But not girls’ books, no way. Which is a shame in a way because the trials and tribulations of Jane Eyre (and other female characters created by 19th European women writers, and not just women writers either, like the aforementioned Jane Austen) related experiences of class, race and social oppression (intertwined with a little off-hand romance to sell books then, and now, to the female reading public) that resonate with this writer today.

So it is something of a gift from the heavens that over the past couple of decades many of the writers that I did not read, steadfastly did not read in case you forgot, have had their work adapted to the screen. Happily this is true for the film under review. That means that this reviewer gets to, as he has on other occasions, see the story line of the book unfold in order to determine whether he would decide to read this book after viewing the film.

And the judgment? There is now a high bar for British romances set by Ms. Austen, most notably with her Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice in the matter of 19th century sensibility. While that standard was not surpassed in this film Ms. Bronte (and the actors here) did give a very decent sense of the oddball (to our eyes), anti-democratic and socially savage way that women, women of no means (or no known means), were shunted off in the backwoods of society.

But spunk is a value we can all appreciate and to use a more modern phrase than would be proper in jolly old England back in the day to describe the evolving plot line- a girl has got tot do what a girl has got to do. On that level this thing is a classic girl (okay woman, Ms. Eyre) meets boy (okay man, Mr. Rochester) story. And, lo and behold, the girl is actually ten times stronger than the boy. And, frankly, twenty times more interesting. Maybe that is why I, steadfastly, did not read Jane Eyre and the others then. But I will now.