And he's made Rochester his own with a dry wit and a simmering resentment that mischievously reinterprets this damaged blueblood as a thinking woman's bit of crumpet, a man who has his dark secrets, but who's willing to let a woman with spark and brain rock his world.įukunaga, who made the well-received 2009 thriller Sin Nombre, has a canny grasp of the fact that as pioneers of chick-lit go, the Bronte sisters were Goth girls to the core. Fassbender is delicately built, but he has knowing bedroom eyes that could make a woman of any age buckle at the knees. So it took me a while to warm up to Michael Fassbender, the versatile pretty boy who played a British army officer in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, a charming molester in Fish Tank and a starved IRA martyr in the small indie film Hunger. Mine's a weird amalgam of the Incredible Hulk and Orson Welles' saturnine turn opposite Joan Fontaine in Robert Stevenson's 1944 film version - a raging, wounded brute sulking from the depths of his easy chair. Her eyes shine with the intelligent curiosity of the marginalized observer, and there's an enticing dominatrix flicker ('I'm not afraid I've simply no wish to talk nonsense') to her banter with her intrigued employer.Įvery woman who grew up reading Jane Eyre has built a tailor-made Rochester in her head. Yet from her arrival at Thornfield to tutor Rochester's spoiled brat (Romy Settbon Moore), Wasikowska subtly lights Jane from within. With a heroine this mousy, you see why a madwoman in the attic is a must. Jane's mouth is tight with the endurance that got her through a rotten childhood with Aunt Reed (Sally Hawkins, seizing the day to play bad egg for once) and years of cruelty at the dread Lowood school. The folks in hair and makeup rounded out Wasikowska's lovely Slavic bone structure and pulled her cascading tresses into the dun-colored bun that traditionally bespeaks British governess. But as the orphaned and abused waif who falls in love across the cavernous British class divide and has made Charlotte Bronte's novel a two-century best-seller, Wasikowska comes of age, morphing from plain Jane to steely Jane to radiant lover, rushing across Yorkshire to reclaim her broken boss.

She picked up a bit of steam as the college-bound daughter in The Kids Are All Right. In Alice in Wonderland, the somewhat vaporous young Australian seemed content to coast on her ethereal beauty while falling down holes on demand. Cary Fukunaga's feverishly soulful remake of the multiply remade Jane Eyre rises to most challenges - not the least of which is making Mia Wasikowska, a golden child of current cinema, look homely.

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