The Dark Balloon

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I review Look Around You, quickly.

So I just discovered, via reddit, Look Around You, the most delicious and spot-on parody (of educational films) television series. It’s absolutely velvety: “What are birds? We just don’t know. / Thanks, ants. Thants. / Water, what hast thou done?” For a start, view the Maths module or, better yet, the Music module. In summary, not having BBC is like not holding hands: You miss out on a lot of good stuff.

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I review Jane Eyre.

Masterpiece Theatre aired Susanna White’s Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Jane Eyre adaptation last night. The first part, anyway; you can, and should, catch the second part airing on January 6, 9 PM Eastern Standard Time if nothing else than to understand all the jokes in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. People were just as good writing human drama back then as they are now, you know. (You should imagine a severe old spinster telling you this right now for bonus effect. Alternatively, Grandpa Donkey Kong from Donkey Kong Country.) It’s quite faithful to the novel; mostly they’ve just sped the timing up since the novel does clock around 600 pages when printed to a standard paperback height and width.

The flaw of the adaptation seems to be the characters. Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, pictured in the first link, play Jane Eyre and Edward Fairfax Rochester. The makeup artists brought out the Frida Kahlo in Wilson, seemingly, stopping at her pouty lips (Alessandra Stanley’s words, not mine). I don’t know how others picture Jane Eyre in their minds: Eyre narrates from first-person that she’s only homely. (Which is quite clever on Brontë’s part since that opens up a world of ambiguity to how the characters, Eyre and again with Rochester, look without going for stereotypical beauty. Given the Gothic Romanticism in the book, Brontë doesn’t forgot the realism either; Eyre’s tone and characterization make it difficult to not empathize with complex figures and the rich plot.)

Anyway, Frida Kahlo is striking in the way that people describe strikingly beautiful models or strikingly sublime art or strikingly delicious food. She stands out more than she is beautiful or she is not beautiful. I never imagined Jane Eyre to be striking: She’s the type of person that recedes into the background unlike the Reed kids, who are stereotypes, or Rochester, who is Jane’s foil. Stanley criticizes Eyre adaptations for resorting to pretending beautiful people playing Jane Eyre to be ugly, but the alternative is to cast a moderately attractive person who doesn’t look anything like the audience imagines Eyre. At least with a beautiful Eyre we know what we’re getting: It’s the big screen; you get pretty people to be big screen actors. With moderately beautiful Eyre, the casting has entered the world of realistic portrayal, which as mentioned above is hard since Brontë purposefully avoided pinning down how Eyre (and to a lesser extent Rochester) look. One false step and you’ve ruined the movie since Eyre happens to be the main character that we’re going to be staring at for the next two hours.

All well. More minor nitpicks with characters that I’ll just rattle off here: Eyre is supposed to look like she’s 17-19 while at Thornfield. The makeup guys didn’t seem to even try this on Wilson, who looks decidedly in graduate school, in part due to the Puritan clothing the plot calls for. (Heck, she looks the same age as Rochester in the New York Times portrait beside Stanley’s review) Adèle looks like she’s a teenager in high school: Her age is ambiguous in the book, but it’s hard for actors older than elementary school age to pull off Adèle’s naïvety without either moving into the dangerous territory that Adèle is just plain stupid or some level of anti-French sentiment. (Also, isn’t Adèle supposed to have bouncy curls?) Rochester looks way too young; he’s supposed to be forty in the play and while they’ve over-highlighted Stephens’ face wrinkles to absurdity (see the first link), his flowing hair doesn’t really make him look a day over 30. There’s really no chemistry between Wilson and Stephens: Wilson says “sir” too often and with too much deference. Where’s the Eyre wit? Where’s the rebellion against authority? Smiling and apologizing for an insult you didn’t land jolts the audience out of the suspension of disbelief. On the other side, Stephens plays Rochester’s manipulation of Eyre a bit too cruelly to where the audience probably hates him by the time Eyre leaves from Thornfield to go to her dying aunt’s side. There’s one point where the writers put in questions for him to repeatedly ask Jane about his future marriage to Blanche Ingram where, I don’t know, I just want to punch him for being a jerk and, more importantly, straying from actual Rochester. Smile or something, god damn it; it’s supposed to be teasing.

Now that I’ve thoroughly pissed on the movie in the past two or three paragraphs thanks to the magic of nitpicking, here’s why you should see the movie: It’s gorgeous. As Stanley mentions, White (the director) took the Gothic undertones of the book to heart and the scenes at Thornfield at night beautifully contrast the verdant greenness of Thornfield’s lawn in the daytime. There’s also one scene where Fairfax gets a letter announcing Rochester’s intentions to throw a party at Thornfield and the movie cuts to a busy household reminiscent of those “busy servants preparing for busy things” scenes you see in Harry Potter or other movies that shift the movie to a quick, jovial tone with music and people moving about and whatnot and I’m definitely not transcribing it correctly and now I’m in a run-on. The dialogue, when the writers aren’t adding stuff or dropping unnecessary foreshadowing into future events (for cleverness? for the ignorant Masterpiece Theatre audience?), is mostly lifted straight from Eyre. Basically, if you like the book you’ll like this adaptation, which is the only one I’ve seen so take the past ten paragraphs you’ve read with a grain of salt or cumin (cumin’s better). It’s Masterpiece Theatre: What can go wrong? Go see it.