A faithful and satisfying adaptation of Bronte’s great novel. Mia Wasikowska is excellent as she always seems to be. She can certainly play a mix of strength and vulnerability; I wonder if she will stay with those types of roles. As Jane, she is perhaps a bit too pretty for the role but her looks are slightly unconventional so it works. Michael Fassbender was just fine as Rochester.
The plotting was solid and covered all the key elements from the book. The first 30 minutes of the film were somewhat rushed as the events from Jane’s childhood are shown in flashbacks. I would have liked to see an extra ten minutes or so added to this section but with the runtime already at two hours commercial reasons make the shortening reasonable. When the pacing slowed down to take on the Jane-Rochester romance the film strengthened. The St. John character was uneven, alternating between harsh religiosity and friendly concern. I believe these qualities were more mixed and simultaneously present in the book. The film's approach of having him take on different characteristics in alternate scenes felt odd.
Some of the camera work was interesting with canted angles and the like used to bring out the gothic elements. These seemed to go away from some reason in the last third of the film.
No comments:
Post a Comment