Review of Jane Eyre (2011) by Marijon B — 07 Jan 2012

There's a website dedicated to film and TV "tropes" and one of them is "Hollywood Homely" -- casting very good looking people to play plain, homely or ugly characters. Every version of Jane Eyre yet made has done this, but this one went over the top with the trope by boasting a beautiful actress, whom some critics think was sufficiently "plain" because her hair was severe and her clothes were dull, and a handsome, bland actor to play Rochester.

(Fassbender was even duller in A Dangerous Method. A fine actor, yes; an interesting one, not so much.) The novel Jane Eyre focuses on the fact that people of the time made the mistake of judging people based on their looks, caste/ class and the appearance, or lack thereof, of religious fervor.

Bronte dismissed all of these forms of judgment as shallow and meaningless. While this most recent of the Jane Eyre films touches on class issues, it skims over the religious ones and ignores looks-based discrimination.

The line "you were formed for labor, not for love," uttered by the hyper-religious St. John Rivers, who believes a homely woman like Jane cannot possibly feel or inspire true love, is deleted from the film, as are most other references to Jane's lack of traditional physical attractiveness.

And of course they were deleted because...look who they cast to play Jane. There are plenty of books about beautiful women and handsome men to adapt. If filmmakers want to make movies about beautiful people, why choose one of the very few love stories ever written about an ugly man and an un-pretty woman and mutilate it?