Calling a book a classic is a peculiar damnation, a way of simultaneously placing it on a pedestal and shutting it into a musty old box. As much as we all groan when we hear that yet another great book is set to be "ruined" by some assuredly hapless filmmaker, movies are often the only thing that can save books from themselves -- or, rather, from our calcified ideas of what certain books have to be.
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has had all sorts of life rafts tossed in its direction, including countless mini-series and a 1996 Franco Zeffirelli version (with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg). But this latest Jane Eyre -- directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who made his feature debut in 2009 with the illegal-immigration drama Sin Nombre -- is the one that reminds us what a visceral experience reading a classic can be: Even as Fukunaga honors the book's quintessential Englishness -- it opens with our heroine feverishly wandering the moors, as if the only sure thing were the native soil beneath her feet -- he also distills the raw animal nature that drives it. When the movie's troubled, secretive hero says of the meek (and very young) governess who has charmed him, "I'm sure she'd regenerate me with a vengeance," you know he's talking about more than her skill at fixing him a nice cup of tea.
That hero, Mr. Rochester, is played by the German-born, Irish-raised actor Michael Fassbender, and his diminutive inamorata, the plain Jane of the title, is Mia Wasikowska (most recently seen in The Kids Are All Right and, before that, Tim Burton's antiseptically wiggy Alice in Wonderland). Even if you've never read Jane Eyre, you pretty much know the story: An impoverished but unabashedly intelligent orphan-girl governess arrives at the estate of a rich, surly, mysterious gentleman, who quickly realizes that this small, seemingly mouselike creature is the only human being on the planet who can understand him. In one of the most ardent lines ever committed to paper (and one that defies any mid-19th-century male view of women's inferiority), he welcomes her into his life -- "My equal is here, and my likeness" -- with a sense of near-mystical wonder.
Is it just me, or is it getting hot in here? Fukunaga's Jane Eyre is tuned to the beating pulse of that line, without ever resorting to dumb, bodice-ripping cliches. The script is by Moira Buffini (who adapted Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe), and though she's preserved the strange elegance of Brontë's prose, there's no stiffness in the characters' dialogue -- they sound like real people from a different time, not like hostages who've been kidnapped from the page and slapped up on the screen against their will. Shot by Adriano Goldman, the picture has a strong sense of place: You can almost smell the dense mossiness of the misty countryside or the evanescent sweetness of blossoming orchards, and the movie's interiors, hung with dense velvets or lit by cozy fires, are as claustrophobic or as welcoming as they need to be. Fukunaga and Buffini have taken some liberties with the book's structure, plucking out a few of its key elements and reassembling them into flashbacks and flash-forwards. But their choices are never jarring, and they may even even heighten the mystery for those lucky ones who have no idea where the story is headed.
Watching Jane Eyre, I envied those who have never read the book: What would it be like to watch this movie without already knowing all of the story's secrets? Miraculously, Fukunaga preserves much of the book's spooky mysteriousness, its bold hints at the way basically good people can do some really bad stuff and still be redeemed. He's also attuned, as Brontë was, to the unfair horrors that can befall innocents. An early scene shows the very young Jane (at this point played by Amelia Clarkson), entrusted to the care of her cruel aunt (played, with uncharacteristic acidity, by Sally Hawkins), being struck with a book by her abusive cousin: The ringing in her ears fills the soundtrack, too -- it's an abrasive hum. And when she's locked in the room of her aunt's house that most scares her, she throws herself so violently against the door that she knocks herself out. This is a girl who, shy as she may seem, is ready to give it all.
More suffering ensues -- most notably a stint in a hardcore school for lower-class girls, presided over by a sinister Simon McBurney -- before Jane finds her way to the dark and gloomy manse of her new employer, where she's greeted by a no-nonsense but not unkind servant (the always-reliable Judi Dench) and entrusted with the education of a precocious, flirty little girl who speaks only French (Romy Settbon Moore). When she finally meets the often-absent Mr. Rochester, he sizes her up as if she were a dollop of pudding on a plate.
And she is just a little slip of the thing. One of the marvels of this Jane Eyre is its casting: Wasikowska's Jane, in her simple dresses and with her hair coiled modestly at the nape of her neck, still looks like a young girl. Fassbender, on the other hand, is all man, a feral being who looks as if he could swallow her whole. Sex is threatening, as Brontë knew, and Wasikowska and Fassbender make this particular dance look exceedingly dangerous. Fassbender plays Rochester as a man who knows his manners but doesn't always use them -- he's always stalking off abruptly, often in mid-sentence. Fassbender has the right kind of brooding handsomeness to play Rochester, and the performance works because he finds the character's inherent warmth without mistaking it for anything so bland as mere niceness. Rochester's kindness is the cutting kind, and Fassbender -- with his straight, even teeth and his mocking eyes -- knows it.
Wasikowska stands up to him in every way, and her performance rings with understated fierceness. Although the real-life Wasikowska is nothing short of a beauty, she makes us believe in Jane's homespun radiance. It doesn't hurt that she's often lit to look as if she's glowing from within, like a Vermeer painting -- one whose subject always meets our gaze directly.
More astonishing yet, Wasikowska embraces all the carnality Brontë built into this story. In one of the movie's most striking scenes, she lashes out at Rochester for the way he is, she believes, toying with her affections. Wasikowska begins this monologue as if she were an obedient schoolgirl, gradually building it into a miniature manifesto of self-possession -- it's like a lit match encompassing all the heat of a house fire in its tiny flame. Jane Eyre, as Brontë wrote her, is a small girl who makes for a big story. Wasikowska steps easily and naturally into those little footprints stamped out some 160 years ago. In this Jane Eyre, it seems as if they were made only yesterday.