Some press reviews of Jane Eyre

The press is starting also to publish reviews of the first episode of last night's Jane Eyre. These ones are not particularly good, but we are certainly puzzled by the reviewers arguments.

Caitlin Moran in The Times has mixed feelings. She thinks that Ruth Wilson is too pretty but sits well (sic)...

One of the pitfalls of adapting a classic book is your potentially controversial incursion into the readers’ firmly fixed imaginations. Thus: “Mr D’Arcy doesn’t look like that! Zaphod Beeblebrox would never have worn pixie-boots!”, etc.

However, while this is an understandable reaction on seeing a much-loved text converted to a visual medium, the viewer should, by and large, just accept someone else’s vision. After all, one of the many fabulous things about human beings is that we all see things very differently. Really, we should stop being so uptight that other people don’t think exactly like us and instead revel in the fertile cornucopia of humanity’s imagination. It’s like a holiday!

In someone else’s mind! Enjoy it! However, that all said, Jane Eyre (Sunday, BBC One) does absolutely, unequivocally, not look like that. Jane Eyre quite clearly has a round, plain, pale, oddly malleable face, which looks as if it’s been drawn by a pencil. The whole point of her relationship with Mr Rochester is that a man so used to exotic beauties (the French bird, the Creole bird) and rushed, tempestuous affairs, finally slows down, and appreciates Jane’s sane, wren-like vibe.

The BBC’s Jane, on the other hand, is one hot 19th-century governess. She looks like a chick in a Magnum ice-cream advert. She’s got flawless skin, tumbling hair, perfectly sculpted eyebrows and a frankly extraordinary upper lip: a fleshy, kissable duckbill, which appears to vibrate lasciviously in moments of high emotion.

However — and thankfully for the auspices of the rest of the series — Ruth Wilson’s beauty isn’t being made into a big issue. She isn’t going around being beautiful, if you know what I mean. She sits very quietly, and with a cautious stillness — as, indeed, would someone who’d spent most of their life in an evangelical Christian orphanage run by emotional sadists, and then suddenly found themselves living in a castle with a wolf, a sex-case and a mental.

Toby Stephens’s Rochester, meanwhile, while definitely not as tall as Rochester should be — he borders on Titchester, to be frank — is doing well as a sex-case living with a wolf and a mental. There’s a vulcanicity to him. He strikes you as an entity with hot, steaming vents on his lower flanks — even though, on unhappy occasion, his hair does fatally recall Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

In all, despite an unpromising opening 14 minutes — involving the kind of awful child-actors Britain still seems inexplicably to specialise in — Jane Eyre seems to be shaping up well as classic Sunday night, sardines-on-toast sofa-bait.

David Belcher in The Herald is ... well, we don't know really if he is happy or not, but frankly we don't really care too much. But, why is he making this review if he considers Jane Eyre dull, silly and interminable?

Many years have passed, dear reader, since last I studied the printed pages upon which Charlotte Brontë unfolded her agonising melodrama concerning virtue going cruelly unrewarded and passion being rent asunder by duty's stinging scold. Why, upon laying Charlotte's accursed work down, I made a solemn vow which I cannot, on pain of death, gainsay: never to read the damnably dull, interminably silly fiction that is Jane Eyre again! (...)

Rotten book for ninnies; enjoyable telly show.

This ninnies' blog is frankly disappointed reading so much ignorance masked as irreverence.

Finally, Iain Heggie in The Scotsman is sorely disappointed:

Jane Eyre has a classic first-person narrator problem. The heroine is isolated and without a confidante. She can only pour her heart out on to the page. But what's she to do on TV? Voiceover is the obvious answer, but there seems to be an anti-voiceover fashion on TV just now. Certainly this adaptation has not solved the problem. Ruth Wilson, as any actor would, struggled to find ways of showing what was going on in Jane's mind. Charlotte Brontë's narrating voice in the novel helps one buy into the horse accidents, burning beds and mad maids in the corridor but, stripped of that voice, these incidents came over as the redundant plot furniture of gothic melodrama.

Voiceover is not a fashion or not. It's well used or not. And we don't think AT ALL that voiceover is the only option in a first-person narration adaptation. Most of the times, but not always, voiceover reveals a lack of imagination of adaptators.

For all her love of Thackeray Brontë is not a great satirist and the crude writing and acting around the snobs was so ridiculous I longed for Jane to take the piss as adeptly as *Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet would have.

Here we are. Maybe the reviewer wanted to see another Pride and Prejudice. Funny, because when Pride and Prejudice was premiered last year, many critics complained because it was to Brontë-ish.

Having said that, though they are not exactly Bogey and Bacall, the best scenes are the more intimate ones between the two leads. The direction calms down and we're led fairly eloquently through their developing relationship.

EDIT: Sam Wollaston in The Guardian has the next three Sunday nights taken care of.

What's this? What is Jane Eyre (BBC1, Sunday), doing among miles and miles of sand dunes? Is this Jane Eyre of Arabia? Or perhaps the lesser-known sequel: The Wide Sahara Desert? Maybe it's sponsored by Fry's Turkish Delight - you know, "full of eastern promise". Oh, I see, it's just a fantasy she's having, reading books behind the curtain at Gateshead Hall, to escape her miserable lonely life and John Reed's bullying. Get to the red room, girl. I remember the red room - scary. (...)

It's all very stylised and gothic: the silhouette of a horse-drawn carriage on the skyline, the turrets of Thornfield against the night sky, the red curtain flying from Bertha's window in the spooky north tower. And it looks fabulous, but substance hasn't been sacrificed for style. Apart from galloping through the beginning, it seems to be quite faithful to Charlotte Brontë (from what I can remember - it's been a while). But it feels right. And there are two great performances - from Toby Stephens, as a fiery and brooding Rochester, and from Ruth Wilson, as an awkward, embarrassed but quietly determined Jane Eyre.

Categories: In_the_News,Jane_Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV