If you're like me, you never read the book because it looked stupid and boring. Nonetheless, if you are planning to eventually read the book, **WARNING--164-year-old SPOILERS**Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) has had a rough life. Orphaned and left with an aunt who hates her, Jane is packed off to a repressive boarding school where her only friend dies of illness. Undaunted, young Jane grows up and gets a job as governess to the French ward of a rich dude named Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) out in the middle of nowhere. The girl is the daughter of a favorite prostitute of Rochester's who had died and left her to his care. Apparently, that's how you do things in the 1840's. Anyway, Rochester is kind of an asshole but he starts to warm up to Jane. Warms up enough to propose, at any rate, totally shocking the housekeeper (Judi Dench). Just as they are about to tie the knot, however, BOOM! Some random dude from Jamaica shows up and says that they can't get married because Rochester already has a wife. A crazy one he keeps locked up in the attic because she keeps trying to kill him. But still legally his wife. Personally, I think Crazy Bitch would have been better served with an "accidental" fall from a window the first time she tried to set fire to me but that's frowned upon. Jane runs away across the moors and gets found by a preacher (Jamie Bell) who's looking for a schoolteacher. After living in obscurity for a while, Jane gets the news that her last surviving relative has died and left her a fortune. She only found out about this uncle when her aunt, the one who hated her, was on her deathbed and confessed that Rich Uncle wanted to take Jane in as a child but the aunt told him she had died at boarding school. Now that's fucked up. Anyway, now that she's rich, the preacher proposes in a bold attempt to make it out of the Friend Zone but is denied because Jane still wants Rochester. She heads back to the manor house only to find that it is a burned out ruin, which a gentle push out a window would have prevented.
I was ready for her to only be confronted with Rochester's grave because that seemed to be par for the course in this chick's life but he's alive, just blinded by the fire. Which I don't even know how that's possible with no other burn scars but I'm not a doctor. Whatever. He's "tragically marred" but she still loves him. I did like that Jane didn't fall apart like a lot of heroines from that time. She actually came off as someone who wasn't a complete waste of space but was unfortunately born in the wrong time period.
The costumes were all right, I guess. They were obviously well-researched and everything had to be custom-made but I wouldn't call them special. They reminded me a lot of Mia's opening costume in Alice in Wonderland (which actually won the Oscar for Costume Design), only more drab.
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