Jane Eyre *** (1996, William Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anna Paquin, Joan Plowright, Richard Warwick) – Classic Movie Review 2671

Director Franco Zeffirelli’s 1996 version of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic novel is rather flat, un-dynamic and un-vibrant. Although the film is highly polished and has several redeeming features, including Charlotte Gainsbourg’s stellar performance as Jane Eyre.

A miscast, hangdog William Hurt (with a too deliberate, carefully studied English accent) stars as Mr Rochester and gives a struggling turn as a Byronic anti-hero tormented by family troubles, injustices and secrets. But a very considerably better Charlotte Gainsbourg does sterling work as tragically abandoned, waifish Jane. And Anna Paquin is fine as the character’s younger self.

Jane is the girl cast out by her aunt, Mrs Reed, and sent to be raised in a harsh charity school for girls. She becomes the plain, impoverished young woman who is hired by Mr Rochester through the housekeeper Mrs Fairfax (Joan Plowright) to work at Thornfield Hall as a governess for Adele (Josephine Serre).

The British acting worthies are encouraged to bang on a bit and overplay to fill the vacant spaces in Hugh Whitemore and Zeffirelli’s screenplay, which compresses and eliminates most of the plot in the book’s last quarter to shrink it into a 116-minute movie.

The esteemed Zeffirelli, with his Italian, operatic sensibilities, is probably the wrong choice of director, though he directs with much sense and sensibility.

A plush production and generally capable acting make up for a chilly and sombre mood – and the lack of passion. But, oddly, the film doesn’t even look English, though it was all filmed in the UK.

Richard Warwick.

Richard Warwick plays the servant John in his last film role.

British actor Richard Warwick, who acted in three Zeffirelli films [also Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Hamlet (1990)], died of AIDS on December 16, 1997, aged 52. When he died, his If… director Lindsay Anderson said: ‘I never met a young actor like Richard! Without a touch of vanity, completely natural yet always concentrated, he illumines every frame of the film in which he appears.’

Also in the cast are Geraldine Chaplin, Fiona Shaw, Elle Macpherson, John Wood, Amanda Roos, Charlotte Attenborough, Billie Whitelaw, Maria Schneider and Samuel West.

The location for Thornfield Hall is Haddon Hall, Bakewell, Derbyshire, UK, previously used as the castle for The Princess Bride.

It was remade as Jane Eyre in 2011 with Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell.

William Hurt (March 20, 1950 – March 13, 2022) made his film debut in Ken Russell’s 1980 Altered States, followed by the 1981 neo-noir Body Heat. He had three consecutive nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Children of a Lesser God (1986), and Broadcast News (1987), winning for the first of these.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2671

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