Awesome Adaptations (3) - Jane Eyre 2011

Awesome Adaptations is a weekly bookish meme, hosted at Alisa Selene’s books blog, Picturemereading.  Anyone can play along! Each week there is a new category of adaptation to blog about. Any format (television series, film, web series, etc.) is acceptable as long as it is based in some form on a book. If you’re playing along on your own blog, just mention Picturemereading in your post and include the banner above. Let them know which film you’d pick and why it is an awesome adaptation worth watching. Oh, and don’t forget to share the link to your own post in the comments for that week’s challenge so that everyone can read your thoughts!

An awesome adaptation of a great romance

Title: Jane Eyre

Adapted from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Just so you know, I did consider not blogging about Jane Eyre for this one since I talk about it so much, but when it comes to adaptations and great romances, I've seen so many adaptations of Jane Eyre that I just kept coming back to it.  My dilemma though is in picking one since there have been so many. Granted not all have been awesome...

Though I dearly love the 1973 miniseries with Sorcha Cusack and Michael Jayston, I think I'm going to go with the recent 2011 film for this post, which I also dearly love for different reasons.  The main reason being how it creatively interprets the source material to complement the aesthetic of a film but also maintains the spirit of the original novel.  So as an adaptation from a book to a film, I think it is extremely successful.

The first thing I really appreciate about this film is in the cohesion - there is a unified vision to the storytelling.  Although each part shines individually, no part outshines the other, as it all contributes to the whole.  I feel that the cinematography, the music, the directing, the acting, the script, and the lighting even, all come across as restrained but simmering, muted but emotional. There is such a vibrancy and realism to the storytelling. The look and feel of this film just brings the whole world of the novel to life for me.

Obviously I think the novel has a great romance - a romance built on thoughtful conversations and witty repartee, on character personalities that complement each other, and on the fact that Jane and Rochester just need each other on every level.  To get EVERYTHING across in a two hour film is impossible. Previous adaptations with those important (abridged) scenes where Jane and Rochester get to know each other come across as rushed or perfunctory sometimes, but the 2011 film has the tone of the scene in the dialogue and the actor's expressions and the atmosphere.  I watch and listen to the actors and I feel the emotion of the piece come across almost as I feel it from the novel.  And Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender are fantastic at having their inner feelings subtly betrayed through their acting when they are not actually saying what they feel.  I find all the romances I really enjoy have that element of the main twosome not being able to reveal their feelings for each other for some time.  I just love that restraint and tension and I feel like that is wonderfully teased out in this film.  And to cap all that off, there is the farewell scene - (my favorite scene in the novel, where Jane and Rochester talk after the failed wedding) and this scene is accurately, beautifully, heart-breakingly portrayed in this film - definitely better done in this version than all the other film versions of Jane Eyre!  (And most miniseries!)

For a short trip through the great romance of Jane and Rochester this gorgeously rendered, nuanced, sensitive, and awesome adaptation of Jane Eyre is the one to watch!