Jane Eyre (2011)

Cary Joji Fukunaga's 2011 adaptation of Jane Eyre arrives with the grim determination of a film that has read the novel and intends to honor it. The moors are damp, the hall is cold, and Mia Wasikowska blinks through her suffering with the watchful stillness of someone who has already learned not to expect much. Michael Fassbender's Rochester broods and snaps and smolders in the approved manner. It is a handsomely mounted production, and the costume design earned an Academy Award nomination, which is the sort of recognition this kind of film tends to receive.

The interesting question is what Jane herself brings to the proceedings. She refuses to be owned, insists on her own moral equality, and walks away from a man she loves because he lied to her. This is a proto-feminist protagonist, and the film knows it. What it does not do is announce it. The independence is dramatized through behavior and dialogue, not through speeches aimed at the audience. We are watching a character, not attending a seminar. That restraint is the film's chief virtue and the reason its social content registers as classical rather than contemporary.

Elsewhere the ledger is quiet. Bertha Mason is presented as a shrieking gothic hazard behind a locked door, her Caribbean origins left unexamined, her madness a plot mechanism instead of a case study. The Jamaican money that funds Thornfield raises no questions about empire. The servants know their place and the film does not interrogate it. Class is a fact of the setting, not an argument. What remains is a well-made romance about two difficult people and a house with a secret. It is enough. It is not more.