Too-Plain Jane
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Movies Too-Plain Jane By John Podhoretz Jane Eyre is an intelligent, judicious, and sober cinematic adaptation of an overripe, overrich, hysterical masterpiece. The movie is an honorable and...
...In his forties now and considerably less handsome than he once was, Hurt is physically right for the part but has utterly lost the amazing spark that once made him the most exciting American actor of his generation...
...Here, he and co-screenwriter Hugh Whitemore take most of their dialogue from Bront?'s novel, and have managed to compress a 500-page book into a two-hour movie rather ingeniously...
...It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her...
...Blind puppy...
...By contrast, Zeffirelli's Jane is angry, defiant, and nearly as mute as the heroine of The Piano...
...Has there ever been such an onscreen collapse...
...In the book, she gives herself a page-long lecture, a small part of which runs as follows: "Cover your face and be ashamed...
...They took some guidance from the wonderful 1944 movie version with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, written in part by Aldous Huxley...
...He has made only one film (The Doctor) of any consequence since Kiss of the Spider Woman and is now taking weird parts in third-rate artsy fare like last year's Second Best, in which he essayed a shy Welsh teacher about as credibly as Hanks limned Sherman McCoy...
...Bront?'s Jane Eyre is magical and more than a little nuts, and if ever a movie version of a book could use all the bells, whistles, and gewgaws of vulgar big-budget filmmaking- swooping cameras, crashing thunderstorms, eye-popping sets, maybe a special effect here or there- Jane Eyre could...
...and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis fatuus-like, into wintry wilds whence there is no extrication...
...Consider the difference when a despairing Jane decides she is too plain and common for the likes of the wealthy Rochester (William Hurt...
...This is a book that begins with a tortured child left to nightmares in a blood-colored room and ends with a blinded and scarred middle-aged man living in the ruins of his once-great house who finds happiness and solace in a woman 25 years his junior...
...The taming of Jane Eyre makes the movie dismal enough, but there is no sight more depressing on display here than William Hurt's Rochester...
...Born to play Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities, he watched in despair as Tom Hanks got the part in the disastrous movie version...
...The movie is an honorable and respectable effort undone by its good taste and emotional reticence...
...He said something in praise of your eyes, did he...
...Bront?'s Jane is one of the most garrulous and expressive heroines in literature...
...As a child, she conducts amazingly sophisticated conversations about the devil and the afterlife with grownups and kids alike...
...Orson Welles was 28 when he committed his Rochester to film, and though he was physically all wrong for the part-too young and dashing- he rose to the occasion and gave his greatest screen performance...
...Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness...
...Director Franco Zeffirelli's most commercially successful movie was the gooey teen romance he made out of Romeo and Juliet almost 30 years ago, and in recent years he has seemed to be working to undo the image that debacle earned him as a defiler of masterpieces...
...Charlotte Bront?'s novel is a singular literary performance, utterly believable on its own terms and utterly incredible as a portrait of real life...
...Hurt underplays Rochester when what the part needs is a big, colossal ham-a failure comparable to Zeffirelli's decision to tidy up Charlotte Bront?'s messy, indelible vision...
...But at the same time, Zeffirelli and Whitemore have brought a strange, Scandinavian austerity to the proceedings, shrouding the movie and its settings in an unrelieved bleakness that extends as well to the chilly title performances of Anna Paquin (Jane as a child) and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Jane as an adult...
...He doesn't so much walk through the movie as he looks quizzically around the camera as though he has not the foggiest idea what he is supposed to be doing in front of it...
...In the movie, Jane passes by a mirror, looks at herself, and hisses, "You fool...
...After he won an Oscar in 1986 for a self-indulgent and unconvincing performance as a gay South American in Kiss of the Spider Woman, something started going wrong with Hurt...
...as an adult, she captures the fancy of her sullen employer, Mr...
...He succeeded beyond anyone's expectations with the remarkably effective version of Hamlet a few years ago starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close...
...and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it...
...Rochester, because of the brilliance and quick-wittedness of her conversation...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 32
