![]() The subtle visual inflections and deliberately constricted performances contribute to a slow-burn effect that compels up to a point. Disquieting later passages - from Jane’s first meeting with the surly, mysterious Rochester (Fassbender) to her growing awareness of some malevolent, unseen presence - are shot with the shivery atmospherics of a horror picture. There’s a bit of “The Turn of the Screw” in this “Jane Eyre”: When Jane is installed as a governess at Thornfield and received by Judi Dench’s benign, faintly reproving housekeeper, the house is cloaked in the sort of impenetrable shadows that might have been lensed by Gordon Willis. And whereas past adaptations have relied on voiceover as a substitute for Jane’s first-person narration, Fukunaga avoids such exposition with a bold insistence on image-driven storytelling. Though Fukunaga was hardly an orthodox choice to direct a period costumer after “Sin nombre” - his 2009 debut about Central American immigrants - his hand can be discerned in the film’s unusually blunt, visceral dramatization of Jane’s ordeals, such as an abrupt cut to the lash of a cane against the girl’s back. This makes for an intuitive segue into her early years as a spirited child (Amelia Clarkson) brutally mistreated by her aunt (Sally Hawkins), who soon packs her off to a parochial hellhole to suffer the abuses of a self-righteous headmaster (Simon McBurney). John Rivers (Jamie Bell) and his two sisters (Holliday Grainger, Tamzin Merchant), whose introduction early on underscores the absence of family that is Miss Eyre’s most wounding privation. In an unusual gambit, scribe Moira Buffini (“ Tamara Drewe”) shuffles the chronology with a simple, elegant framing device: Rather than detailing Jane’s cruel Victorian orphanhood, the opening scenes are marked by a sense of tragic inevitability as the older Jane (Mia Wasikowska) is seen fleeing Thornfield Hall, into a quintessentially Brontean landscape of wild moors and sodden English weather. From the 1944 Joan Fontaine-Orson Welles film to the 1996 version directed by Franco Zeffirelli, nearly every feature-length “Jane Eyre” has had to wrestle with the challenge of condensing Bronte’s episodic narrative, a task more easily managed by five-hour-plus adaptations such as the beloved 1983 miniseries.
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