Jane Eyre

Dramatic adaptations of Char­lotte Brontë's Jane Eyre tend to go for romantic embroidery and Gothic grandilo­quence. But the new movie version, directed by Cary Fuku­naga, feels pared down in all respects except the emotional. It has a piercing ferocity.

Moira Buffini's expertly redacted screen­play gets to the heart of the novel, the passionate love affair of two intellectual equals who are also cursed souls: an unwanted 19-year-old orphan (Mia Wasi­kowska) hired on as a governess at a country estate called Thornfield, and her rich employer, Edward Rochester (Mi­chael Fassbender), whose clandestine past follows him like a ghost. Buffini begins with Jane's desperate escape from Thorn­field after her engagement to Rochester blows up in her face. Jane's attempt to reinvent herself is the frame for a series of flashbacks to her miserable childhood—first with the aunt who raises her without affection and then at Lo­wood School, a charitable institution run by a pitiless tyrant—and to her tenure at Thornfield, where she experiences freedom and love for the first time.

Reconfiguring the narrative is a gamble that pays off brilliantly. St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell), the devout missionary who rescues Jane from starvation after she runs away from Thornfield, comes across as a humane but equally unyielding echo of Mr. Brocklehurst (Simon McBurney), the zealot in charge of Lowood. (Jane's childhood companion, the doomed Helen Burns, is a warmer, open-hearted Chris­tian soul countering both these chilly men.) And St. John—who offers Jane marriage without love, both of them sacrificing their desires to toil for God—is a dim alternative to Rochester's heart-whole lover, willing to challenge social convention to win the woman he adores.