More Jane Eyre reviews

The Sunday newspapers seem to be quite packed with reviews and comments about the new Jane Eyre. First of all, this is the synopsis and cast for today's episode according to RadioTimes:

Mr Rochester's bed is on fire, though sadly not with passionate love for governess Jane. Not yet, anyway. But the erotic charge between the two is unmistakable in the second part of this splendid dramatisation of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel. Leads Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson are just wonderful, casting knowing, sometimes playful glances at one another as they begin to fall in love. No-one actually uses the "L-word", which just makes it all the more sexy. Of course, there is a blot on the romantic horizon for Jane in the shape of ringleted, frothy bore Blanche Ingram (Christina Cole), but we all know that she's not woman enough for Mr R. Meanwhile, those noises from the attic grow louder and there's an appalling incident that requires Jane's sensible intervention. RT reviewer: Alison Graham

Jane Eyre - Ruth Wilson
Rochester - Toby Stephens
Lady Ingram - Francesca Annis
Mrs Fairfax - Lorraine Ashbourne
Grace Poole -Pam Ferris
Adèle - Cosima Littlewood
Blanche Ingram - Christina Cole (in the picture)
Mrs Reed - Tara Fitzgerald
John Eshton- Aidan
McArdleMason- Daniel Pirrie
Doctor Carter- Stephen Tomlin
Bessie- Rebekah Staton
Colonel Dent- Arthur Cox
Dent twin- Beth Steel
Dent twin- Amy Steel
George- Ned Irish
Leah- Letty Butler
Sophie- Elsa Mollien
Mary Ingram- Maisie Dimbleby
Mrs Dent- Charlotte West-Oram
Sir George Lynn- Tim Goodman
Lady Lynn- Jeanne Golding

Andrew Anthony in The Observer makes the compulsory play on words with Reader, I .... and seems to like the new production:

For better or worse, television cannot afford the luxury of the long game. It has to work now, and it has to work up against all that's gone before. Thus Jane Eyre comes to the screen dragging enough baggage to fill the capacious interior of Thornfield Hall, the gloomy gothic pile in which the story unfolds. Is there any viewer over the age of 10 who doesn't know the dark secret locked away upstairs? The real danger at Thornfield is not pyromania but parody. One false move and a scene becomes a sketch.

In the event, this handsome new four-parter got off to a confident beginning, due in no small part to a splendidly contained performance from Ruth Wilson in the title role. (...)

Except Rochester's soul, as inhabited by Toby Stephens, was a purple shade of black. He played Charlotte Bronte's menacing hero as more ironic than Byronic, making not merely a gesture towards the audience's sympathy but a face-full of gestures that stopped just short of a theatrical wink. And yet it's an entertaining and oddly persuasive portrayal. (...)

Well paced, beautifully designed and astutely scripted, Jane Eyre again confirms, like last year's Bleak House, that the bright future of British drama remains dressed in
the costume of the dim past.

And now we have this review from The Times. The reviewer, A.A. Gill, starts with a good dose of gender clichés (it's like a male version of Goodwin's comments on Reader I married Him):

I don’t know a single man who would put Jane Eyre in their top 10 novels, and I doubt if I know a woman who wouldn’t. The defining difference between the sexes is concealed somewhere under the drab grey of plain Jane’s skirts, and I think I speak for a lot of men when I say, we’re not going to go there to find out.

Well, certainly you don't speak for ME.

We really don’t get the point of Jane Eyre. She’s a manipulative midget, a professional victim, a goody-goody martyr with a monobrow, who has been polished
by unfairness and calamity until she shines with self- regard. No character in history is weighed down with so much syrupy beatitude. Jane Eyre could be called Miss Righteous Catches Mr Right, except that Mr Rochester wouldn’t be Mr Right in a sex offenders’ self-help group. He’s the sort of man who should come with a matching set of bargepoles not to touch him with.

In this paragraph, I think I could only agree with one thing. YOU (please, who do you think you are for speaking in MY name ?) don't get the point of Jane Eyre.

But then, I’m not a woman, and that’s rather the point. Jane Eyre is the least feminist and socially sympathetic of all the classic girls’ romances. But she continues to twist her malign magic on each generation of literate teenagers. All those who can’t be bothered to read get a television adaptation every five years.

No, the problem is not being a woman. The problem is being an ignorant or a superficial person. Or probably both.

But, after this rather disgusting display of ignorance, the author happens to like the show. That can only mean two things, this new Jane Eyre has nothing to do with the original book (and we don't think so) or all these reviewers (and this is not the first example) haven't read Jane Eyre in their adult lives. They say what they feel their roles as popes of irreverence or male pride should say.

But lo, there was a desert, and a small Arab girl sitting in a sand dune. “Hello,” I thought. “Hello, someone’s got their Everyman’s Classics in a twist.” And, despite myself, despite my best modernist intentions, despite everything, I was dragged kicking and screaming, clinging to the sofa like a naughty orphan, and reeled in by Jane Eyre. I became a big girl wrapped in the romance of it all.

This, I’m ashamed to say, is a wonderfully reconceived and re-energised production, beautifully stylised, with a pared-down look and beautifully bleak lighting. The usual bric-a-brac of period detail has been dumped, so there’s no extraneous clutter on the screen. (...)

Toby Stephens is the pleasure deferred, a predict- able piece of trouser totty cast as Rochester. He glowers and glooms and sulks in an acceptably gothic manner, yet I can never quite get away from the feeling that, if he were brought up to date, Rochester would be a conflation of a hedge-fund manager and Simon Cowell.

Ruth Wilson’s Jane is what really lifts this production to being exceptional. She is a servant without being servile or simpering, strong without being wilful; and by doing very, very little, she manages to evoke an awful lot. With a twitch of her Nike swoosh eyebrows, she elicits a slow-burn, knicker-melting erotic energy with Rochester.

We end this rather long post with a note of humour. Victoria Coren in The Guardian goes back to the news about Ruth Wilson's corset and tries to imagine what could be Jane Eyre's story if she was a modern fashion-victim Bridget Jones kind of heroine:

'But do you suppose,' I inquired of Mr Rochester on the morning of the wedding, 'that this vapoury veil makes my face look fat?'
'I do not think that it does,' he replied.
'That's because you've gone completely blind!' I exclaimed. 'I look like a house and you cannot admit it.'
Reader, I dumped him.

And that works much better than all those wanna-be cheeky reviews from ignorant journalists.

Categories: In_the_News, Jane_Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV