Jane Eyre Zeffirelli gives us a muted Jane and a defanged Rochester
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva ME ROCHESTER, YOU Zeffirelli's 'Jane Eyre The latest screen version of Jane Eyre, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, has pace, sufficient atmosphere, and generally good acting....
...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...
...By day, the place is a miracle of comfort to the formerly starved and abused Jane but at night a house of horror where a madwoman roams, threatening to burn people alive in their beds...
...A great cinematographer, David Wat-kins, preserves a nice balance in capturing the look of Rochester's country house...
...Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre feels like an instant classic: smooth, confident of our approval, a little dull...
...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...
...When Jane revolts she goes all the way...
...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...
...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...
...The script, though it defangs Bronte, is a generally deft piece of work, not just an abridgment but an intelligent distillation of the plot...
...Now let me speak of what makes it watchable, even diverting...
...Hurt possesses only a fair knack for wearing nineteenth-century clothes, and his British accent sounds propped up rather than commanded, but he succeeds in conveying the vulnerability that draws Jane to him...
...Nor is the monotony purely vocal...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In this tale that features pyromania and hairbreadth rescues, the clarification of location and distance enhances the suspense...
...Still, better too much dramatic muscle than lard...
...Welles treating himself to road-operatic sculpturings of body, cloak, and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly"), William Hurt's performance emphasizes the ravaged decency that Rochester tries to disguise with cynical insouciance...
...Why, she pounces upon the much larger boy and proceeds to beat the daylights out of him...
...The effect hardly conveys the impression of a girl trying to be true to her own nature...
...That power to shock isn't in this movie...
...Playwright Hugh Whitemore cleverly finds just the bits of Bronte's dialogues that can be spoken without jarring our ears, and he rewrites or eliminates what might seem florid...
...But Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre acts moderately and mousily...
...Jane has learned of Rochester's mad wife and her dreams of marital happiness have been shattered...
...What's missing is the danger-ousness which also attracts the heroine...
...And getting exactly what we want doesn't rouse us...
...Open the book and what a surprise...
...must have been the first of many shocks for the novel's early readers, but the movie substitutes easygoing pathos for that shock...
...She's an extremist heroine of an extremist book...
...For all the pyromania and bigamy and madness of its story, this movie is too nicely manicured...
...You can see why Zeffirelli cast Charlotte Gainsbourg...
...I say "of course" because we who have watched "Masterpiece Theater" episodes are used to images of distraught heroines being hustled off in broughams...
...She leaves her lover's estate...
...It's a pathetic enough image but it's also exactly the sort of thing we expect in any movie about an orphan...
...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...
...Jane Eyre is meant to be subdued, not squashed...
...The movie, of course, must synopsize, but look at the incident that the adaptors (Zeffirelli and British playwright Hugh White-more) choose to epitomize little Jane's response to her mistreatment...
...To picture a female child behaving this way (imagine Dick-ens's Little Nell reacting so fiercely...
...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...
...But it also conveys a feeling of second-handedness that truly first-rate adaptations avoid...
...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...
...The script is/perhaps, a little too trim in that it hops from one crucial scene to the next without giving the viewer's attention enough time to rest before the next crisis...
...Unlike Orson Welles's super-Byronic 1944 Rochester opposite Joan Fontaine (James Agee...
...Paquin, spontaneous and expressive in The Piano, is so overdi-rected 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, carissimal Now think sad thoughts...
...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...
...How could it be otherwise...
...The movie's Jane, of course, drives away in a carriage with all her baggage aboard...
...And dangerousness is what's missing from the entire movie...
...The uncon-ventionality 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...
...Or take a much later episode...
...Well, a classic is only a classic until you start reading it...
...Little Jane is indeed baited by her beastly male cousin, and what does the helpless little girl-child do...
...Take the opening scenes of book and movie, which deal with the oppressed existence of the orphaned Jane in a household of cruel relatives...
...Then it disturbs...
...Her performance is absolutely static...
...But appearance can never take the place of performance in the case of a major dramatic role...
...Watkins knows how to manipulate sunlight to convey the comfort and how to place shadows to intimate the dread...
...then it may still shock...
...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...
...When the actress reads the last line of the film-"Our happiness is complete"-Gainsbourg sounds as if she were announcing funeral arrangements...
...Nothing unusual there...
...But turn to the novel and your jaw drops...
...That's the worst of the movie...
...You can understand just how far away Jane's bedroom is from her little pupil's and from Rochester's, and how long it would take her to get to either at a moment of physical danger...
...And both Watkins and Zeffirelli accomplish something very rare in movies set in large houses: they give the viewer a sense of just where one room is in relation to the others...
Vol. 123 • June 1996 • No. 11
