Jane Eyre enters into its fourth weekend (II)

More Jane Eyre 2011 reviews.

Positive

The Tyee (Canada) reviews the film but focuses mainly on the Jane Eyre experience in a lovely article:

When the newest version of Jane Eyre opened in theatres last Friday, my sister and I practically ran to the ticket counter and flung our cash madly at the woman manning the register. The question uppermost on our fevered brains: what of Rochester? Would they get him right? Or would this iteration be a merely shadow of the hulking creature that has haunted my heart and mind since childhood.
Gentle reader, I am pleased to announce that he's not half bad, a little on the skinny side, but nonetheless possessed of that broody saturnine intensity that makes young girls and old ladies swoon. I feel a sweat breaking out at the mere thought of the man. Excuse me while I whilst I fan my heaving bosom.
The rest of the film is not half bad either. (Dorothy Woodend)

For DVD Talk the film is 'highly recommended':

Fukunaga's "Jane Eyre" is a fantastically compelling, spellbindingly photographed motion picture, soaking up the bitterness and regret that defines the emotional ooze of the story, while twisting around ridiculously known elements to expose darker, substantial moments of seduction. There's little sunshine allowed here, with the feature finding fertile dramatic ground in pained expressions and gut-rot frustration; however, in Fukunaga's capable hands, there's undeniable beauty in all the misery and turmoil. (Brian Orndorf)

The Wig (Canada):

Jane Eyre will make you feel like you’re 16 again, falling tumultuously into your first love. But with a genius more in-tune to feminine thought than a certain Stephenie Meyer, Brontë and Fukunaga get to the heart of what that empowers: passion and romance, yes, but also a coupled ability for intelligent thought and an independence that’s wholly female. (Holly Gordon)

The Cape Cod Times:

Certain films give you the same satisfaction that comes with reading a great novel. This is one of them. (Tim Miller)

The Salt Lake Tribune:

It may be overstating things to call this a feminist interpretation of Brontë’s story. It is, however, one of the few movie adaptations of Jane Eyre that truly feel as if it’s Jane’s story to tell. (Sean P. Means)

The Murrow Network - a high school journal - gives the film 5 stars.

Mostly positive

The New Orleans Times-Picayune gives it 3 stars out of 4:

Fukunaga bolts through this earlier part of Brontë's story, which is a shame given that in the process he's forced to orphan so many details and so much nuance. But on another level it's smart filmmaking, because the sooner Fukunaga can get Wasikowska onscreen, the better. [...]
The resulting mood -- melancholy, spooky, off-putting -- is very important to the success of this "Jane Eyre."
But Wasikowska's performance is the keystone on which everything else rests. (Mike Scott)

The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel gives it 3 stars:

Fukunaga enhances Wasikowska's performance by populating his film with visual and aural details: a flock of birds that sound as if they're keening in harmony with Wasikowska's own grief, shocking flashbacks of brutality and mysterious, dark things that go bump in the night.
Unfortunately, as Rochester, the master of the manor, Michael Fassbender ("Inglourious Basterds," "Hunger") fails to match Wasikowska's ability to sink into character so deeply and completely, leaving us spellbound by her majestic bearing despite her poverty. Instead, some of his actions and exclamations are over the top and hammy - and in some scenes, his hair and beard are so unruly as to be laughable. (Sue Pierman)

Movie Examiner considers it a 'rent-it' (as opposed to see-it) kind of film but thinks that

Mia Wasikowska [...] may earn herself an Oscar in her portrayal of Jane Eyre. (Ryan Pratt)

The film is also reviewed by: I Think, Therefore I Review, Kitty Knits! and White Tank Top. Octavia & Greene draws fashion inspiration from the film.

The Boston Globe - with cartoon by Kim Rosen- uses this new film to reflect on the Jane Eyre phenomenon:

When you read “Jane Eyre’’ you are Jane Eyre. There are other books of which this is true — “David Copperfield,’’ maybe “The Catcher in the Rye’’ — but “Jane Eyre’’ has a wider range of emotion, a more rigorous ethical compass, a deeper vein of erotic feeling, and a more colorfully and realistically mixed bag of flaws and attributes.
When Jane cries out to Rochester, “If God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you,’’ she is both declaring love and angrily protesting unfairness. It’s a messy combination of feelings — but recognizable: most of us have either blurted out, or wished we had the nerve to blurt out, something of the sort.
And that’s what is so powerful and real about “Jane Eyre.’’ Despite its extreme situations, the novel charts a kind of interior maturation progress that we all feel and know. It’s the story of an unruly misfit who eventually becomes a poised misfit, someone who struggles to govern strong feelings without either punishing or squelching them. (Joan Wickersham)

The British press is concerned about the classics not being much read by GCSE pupils. The Education Secretary, Michael Gove, writes about the matter in the Telegraph:

Visiting America last month, I was struck by the way a culture of reading is instilled in every child at the earliest possible age, even in schools serving the poorest pupils. In Washington DC, a group of children stopped, in the middle of an engineering project, to tell me about their favourite novels, from sci-fi to Charlotte Brontë.[...]
Even when children do engage with books, our constricted exam system doesn’t encourage them. The curriculum suggests authors from Pope and Dryden to Trollope and Tennyson – but the English Literature GCSE only actually requires students to study four or five texts, including one novel. In exams more than 90 per cent of the answers on novels are on the same three works: Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. Indeed, out of more than 300,000 students who took one exam board’s paper last year, just 1,700 studied a novel from before the 20th century: 1,236 read Pride and Prejudice, 285 Far from the Madding Crowd and only 187 coped with Wuthering Heights.

The Daily Mail and the Evening Standard also echo the news.

Another column in the Telegraph, however, doesn't fully agree with Michael Gove's bleak views on the matter:

The Education Secretary's argument is somewhat overblown (a quick office poll finds that children do still read Austen and Dickens at school – not so much Thackeray and Trollope) but Mr Gove is right that the English syllabus has changed markedly in the past 25 years.
For time-stretched teachers under pressure to get results it is much easier to spoon-feed students modern novels in plain prose.
They usually pick something that will provoke discussion rather than enjoyment in language. So pupils leave school thinking that Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird are the best that the novel has to offer – and whatever the virtues of those books, that's a rather narrow view.
If it's issues you want, though, 19th century literature is full of them. [...]
If you want to read about being an alienated minority why not read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights with its dark, gipsy hero Heathcliff?
Or her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre, which pitches her spirited English heroine against the Caribbean madwoman Bertha Mason. (Sameer Rahim)

The Guardian adds:

What great literature teaches is profoundly social: it teaches us to see the world from other peoples' perspectives, in other times and places. Whether we are following the struggles of an orphan girl in Jane Eyre, floating down a riverboat with an escaped slave in Huckleberry Finn or standing on a cliff being pelted by a storm in King Lear, what we are not doing is simply reconfirming our own points of view. (Sarah Churchwell)

And though not part of the syllabus, we would add that Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall still poses some valid questions too.

At any rate this blog is quite a witness that, if not fully appreciated by one and all, the Classics are alive and pretty well in the 21st century. Not only is there a new Jane Eyre movie in the spotlight, but also countless other smaller projects.The New Hampshire Union Leader has an article on the Leddy Center's stage version of Jane Eyre opening today:

Leddy’s director, Elaine Gatchell, said she and her husband Bruce, the center’s musical director, were going over possible scripts for this spring’s play when she rediscovered “Jane Eyre” in a stage adaptation by Robert Johansen.
“I had read (the original novel) in high school and loved it then, and decided more people should get to enjoy these timeless classics,” she said. “I think the actors truly enjoy being a part of such a masterpiece of English literature.”
She’s assembled a cast of 29 people, though with the exception of Rochester, Jane’s later suitor Sir John and the title character, most have limited time on stage.
“It’s really the story of people who entered and exited Jane’s life,” she said.
With this play, Gatchell said, she wants the audience to be aware of how life was in the early 1800s — how women were treated and might have adjusted or grew and how women live today. (Kathleen D. Bailey)

The Pocklington Post reviews a production of Jane Eyre. The Musical on the other side of the pond, in Hull. The reviewer didn't really like it:

Being a big fan of the Brontë sisters’ novels, I was intrigued by a musical adaptation of Jane Eyre and felt I had to go along for the experience.
I wish I hadn’t bothered. It is fair to say, it did not work.
The children playing young Jane Eyre (Naomi Awre) and Adele (Tabitha Awre) stole the show, however, and they could both very easily have long stage careers ahead of them, either with the company or professionally.
They were not fazed by the large venue or the considerable audience who had come along to see them perform. It was a delight to see so much confidence and ability in such young girls.
The company, as a whole, - and there are a whole lot of them - are clearly a highly-talented bunch of people, with great stage presence and strong singing voices, but I think their skills and time could have been put to better use in a more traditional musical setting.
The sets and costumes were also magnificent, with no expense spared for the lavish production values. (Catherine Goble)

The Western Mail talks to composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, who worked with Northern Ballet to put together their Wuthering Heights.

Q: How did you became involved in this production [Northern Ballet's Cleopatra]?
A: Cleopatra will be my second ballet score. I’ve been working for more than 40 years writing music and writing songs for musicals including Les Misérables and Miss Saigon. I also composed the score for Northern Ballet’s Wuthering Heights. It (Cleopatra) was initially David Nixon’s idea. Five years ago I didn’t have the right feeling or inspiration for Cleopatra but when we did the revival of Wuthering Heights we wanted to add a new sequence in act one because we felt that Heathcliff was missing a little bit, and it was so much fun and so interesting to work together again that I started thinking again about Cleopatra.

The Bookseller reporths that Judy Finnigan - of Richard and Judy fame - will be publishing a book next year.

The first novel, Eloise, is a ghost story and a thriller about "overwhelming grief, passion and betrayal”. It follows Cathy, an apparently happily married woman in her late 40s who begins to have disturbing dreams after her best friend Eloise dies from breast cancer. Cathy has a history of depression and is recovering from a nervous breakdown, so when she confides in her husband her worries about what really happened to Eloise, he thinks she is losing her grip on reality once more.
[Sphere editorial director Catherine] Burke said: "Judy"s wonderful storytelling is utterly compelling. Eloise is reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier and Emily Brontë and the team and I are hugely excited to have the opportunity to work with Judy in bringing her novels to readers." (Katie Allen)

The Oxford University Press Blog interviews team member Kirsty Doole:

If you had to reread one book every year for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Jane Eyre. It’s my joint favourite book, alongside Mrs Dalloway. But the thing about Mrs Dalloway is that you (or rather, I) have to be in the mood for it. Jane Eyre works anytime. Also: Matilda by Roald Dahl.

MobyLives and Oh No They Didn't both mourn the death of Charlotte Brontë on March 31st 1855 but take a look at the afterlife of her Jane Eyre. The Road Won't Rise comments on Jane Eyre and Resenha de Filmes posts in Portuguesse about the 1944 adaptation. The Great Unmade Robert Aldrich Romantic Comedy posts briefly about the 1954 Lux radio play of Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights