Rolling around in the mud together

The Mail & Guardian picks Wuthering Heights 2011 as the movie of the week.

In the most extraordinary way, Arnold achieves a kind of pre-literary reality effect. Her film is not presented as another layer of interpretation, superimposed on a classic and all those other remembered versions, but an attempt to create something that might have existed before the book — something on which the book might have been based, a raw semiarticulate series of events, later polished and refined as a literary gemstone. That is an illusion, of course, but a convincing and thrilling one.
Cathy and Heathcliff are both outsiders: the woman dependent for her future on a marriage proposal, the man on a benefactor’s charity. It is as children that their love is happiest and most uncompromised — and, probably, most clearly doomed.
That said, the decision to use two separate actors to play Cathy and Heathcliff, in their younger and older guises, was for me a little uncomfortable: it is understandable, of course, but the younger leads are, in fact, not so very young, and their later selves are not so very much older, and the apparent transformation is an oddly artificial effect.
It is a minor consideration, given that there is so much in Arnold’s film that is exhilarating. The film gave me something I never expect to get from any classic literary adaptation: the shock of the new. (Peter Bradshaw)

The Oxford Student also comments on this adaptation:

For generations of readers, the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff was shrouded in mystery; with only Nelly’s incomplete version of events to go on, they had no way of knowing exactly how the two children managed to cement their lifelong connection on the lonely moors.  That is, until they saw the 2011 movie version—with Nelly, demoted from her position of narrator to minor servant, the camera was finally free to follow the children out into their refuge in the wilderness and record in detail all the activities that led to their bond. As readers, critics and probably Emily Brontë herself would be surprised to learn, these bonding activities consisted mainly of staring at each other in silence. One wouldn’t expect chats about the weather and exchanges of recipes, but it seems strange that two such intelligent children would have no profound conversations, no exchange of stories and fantasies.
The implication, of course, is that their connection is powerful enough to transcend words; after all, this is a couple whose relationship is strongest when they are rolling around in the mud together. [...]
Significant silences are a common feature of many genres, from high culture to sheer escapist entertainment, from Wuthering Heights to Drive. (Rachael Goddard-Rebstein)

Word and Film reports that Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot is to be a film too and looks at recent on-screen literary adaptations:

Hollywood seems to be getting serious in its on-again, off-again romance with the nineteenth-century novel. Things started heating up late last year when director Joe Wright (“Atonement”) fast-tracked his high-gloss production of “Anna Karenina.” Then came “Submarine” director Richard Ayoade’s very promising cinematic rendering of Dostoyevsky’s The Double, starring Mia Wasikowska, who’s suddenly become the redux romantic heroine of choice with her finely calibrated performance in last year’s gothic iteration of “Jane Eyre” and her upcoming title role in the upcoming adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which added Ezra Miller, the creepy kid from “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” to its talented cast earlier this week.
Now it seems that romantic novels may have upgraded to “trending” status — a distinction that places the last century’s literary giants in dubious company alongside the likes of “The Avengers” and John Travolta’s masseuse – now that Greg Mottola has signed on to direct a big-screen adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ post-college novel, The Marriage Plot, about post-college romantic and intellectual entanglements (whose title references the narrative device of choice for bourgeois turn-of-the-century novelists like George Eliot and the Brontë Sisters). The classics have always been fertile terrain for filmmakers who have produced a reliable yield of fortifying cinematic meals. A few of the best examples of canon-to-celluloid renderings include Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility,” the A&E “Pride and Prejudice” miniseries starring Colin Firth as Darcy, Orson Welles’ and Cary Fukunaga’s versions of “Jane Eyre,” and Scorsese’s doomed love epic, “The Age of Innocence.” But none of these adaptations has packed the emotional power and timelesness befitting such major works of art. (Christine Spines)

The Awl discusses Clarice Starling, of The Silence of the Lambs fame:

A young woman, cut loose for the most part from family and community, comes to live in a strange new land. After she arrives she is told of a brilliant but mysterious and, by all accounts, frightening man, whose reputation is based at least in part on his inability or refusal to relate to any of his peers. When he meets the young woman, however, he is immediately transfixed by her, and their strange kinship—which mystifies and in some cases frightens other characters—fuels the resulting narrative.
If this sounds familiar to you, then you probably recognize it from (a) Jane Eyre; (b) nearly every subsequent romance novel ever written; or, more recently and most prominently, (c) Twilight. And if that particular take on Hannibal and Clarice's relationship surprises you, then you're probably unfamiliar with the place where Hannibal Lecter, romantic hero, can be found most frequently outside the confines of Harris' novels: fanfiction. (Sarah Marshall)

The Montreal Gazette reviews Waiting for the Monsoon by Threes Anna:

One Dutch reviewer says the book reads like “Slumdog Millionaire meets Jane Eyre,” and I’m inclined to agree. (Getta Nadkarni)

WCVB also finds echoes of Jane Eyre in William Landay's Defending Jacob:

The hot new thriller Defending Jacob is burning its way up the bestseller list; meet the local author behind this publishing phenomenon. A new book recounts Boston’s Great Molasses Flood; a local builder turns life with a bookie father into his first novel, and a veteran writer produces a Jane Eyre for modern readers. Plus, a former model turns a clear eye on the beauty business.

The Washington Post reveals that the woman who has won the Sophie Kerr Prize is a Brontëite and The Wall Street Journal finds a mansion in the Bronx that is apparently 'straight out of Wuthering Heights'.

Zimmer mit Stuck posts in German about Jane Eyre 2011.