Jane Eyre

Based on Charlotte Brontë’s famed (yet interminable) novel, Jane Eyre follows the title character (Mia Wasikowska) as she begins to develop feelings for her inscrutable employer (Michael Fassbender’s Mr. Rochester) – with a key discovery inevitably threatening the pair’s happiness. The familiarity of the narrative is, at the outset, not as problematic as one might’ve feared, as filmmaker Cary Fukunaga does a superb job of infusing Jane Eyre with a lush and consistently sumptuous visual style that proves impossible to resist – with the perfectly watchable atmosphere heightened by both Wasikowska and Fassbender’s note-perfect work as the movie’s central characters. There inevitably reaches a point, however, at which the limitations of the source material become more and more problematic, with the less-than-engrossing nature of the storyline compounded by Fukunaga’s reliance on as deliberate and laid-back a pace as one could possibly envision. It’s subsequently difficult to work up any real enthusiasm for or interest in the protagonists’ successful coupling, although, having said that, the film does boast a handful of admittedly compelling and downright stirring moments – including an absolutely enthralling sequence in which both Jane and Mr. Rochester declare their love for one another. The end result is a decent adaptation of a hopelessly uninvolving novel, with the movie’s minor success due almost entirely to Fukunaga’s striking directorial choices and Wasikowska and Fassbender’s magnetic performances.

**1/2 out of ****