In Revue: Close Encounters With the Victorian Gothic

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Plain Jane changes the game, and things will only be the same! Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

Movies, movies, movies. It always seems like you’ve got too many movies! “Help me!” you’re probably saying. Well, that’s why we’re here. To help you. It’s a pretty okay week, except for the Bradley Cooper movie. Unspooling this week, we’ve got a pretty great Brontë sister, a disappointing (though still kind of funny) alien, and the Bradley Cooper movie. Also, we reviewed I Saw the Devil at TIFF, and said it was excellent. And we stand by that. It’s certainly better than the Bradley Cooper movie. In fact, it’s better than any Bradley Cooper movie. Or the best parts of every Bradley Cooper movie cut together into a narrative feature, Trail of the Pink Panther style.

Like J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reimagining, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre takes a well-worn story and strips it down to its most essential elements. As Abrams narrowed in on the relationship between Kirk and Spock, ditching most of the hard sci-fi techie argot, Fukunaga sheds the dusty period piece upholstery that you’d expect to hang heavy over a film like this, instead developing the stifled romance between the strong-willed governess Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) and master of the house Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbender).
After dozens of on-screen adaptations, the story of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is so well-known that rehashing it seems redundant. (After all, everyone knows what The Godfather and Jaws are about without actually needing to see them.) But briefly, it goes like this: an orphan, Jane Eyre grows up emotionally abused by her wicked aunt (Sally Hawkins); she’s shipped off to a boarding school; she matures and finds work at Rochester’s stately manor, where she falls in love with him, then leaves him (spoiler judiciously excised) and finds work as a rural schoolteacher under the guidance of the watchful and earnest St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell). It’s the stuff those geometric plot diagrams are made of.
Immediately, Moira Buffini’s first-rate screenplay energizes the centuries-old story. Buffini and Fukunaga shape the film through flashbacks, beginning with Jane’s appearance at the Rivers’ darkened doorstep. Upturning the relentless forward march of Brontë’s bildungsroman reshapes the entire development of the narrative, beginning with Jane as a fully formed, if shaken, woman and flashing back to trace the experiences that got her there. Fukunaga brings Eyre to life in dark, gloomy tones, shrouding the inherent majesty of the mansions, manors, and lavish costumes in shadow, illuminating them in the trembling light cast off a fireplace. In muting the Victorian excesses, Fukunaga amplifies the story’s more lingering Gothic elements. If his direction suffers, it’s only in his sporadic stabs at moving too far outside of Masterpiece Theatre territory, his canted, extra-wide overhead shots of drab English plains exhibit an overly auteured flourish.
As Jane, Wasikowska is fantastic. With doe-eyed glances betraying her tight-lipped propriety, she wonderfully captures the contradictions tugging at the character. As Rochester, Fassbender is almost too perfect (it’s easy to imagine him absent-mindedly wearing his costume home). His roguish spirit roils underneath the elaborate vests, collars, girdles, coats, and topcoats; the stubborn scruff of his sideburns rendering him every bit a nineteenth-century James Dean.
Fukunaga’s Eyre may be dull, but it’s pleasantly dull—slow-moving but consistently captivating. With its pitch-perfect casting and lively script, this Jane Eyre may well appeal to an audience beyond the twelfth-grade English student trying to pass a quiz on Brontë’s novel by hurriedly watching the film version the night before.
Jane Eyre opens Friday, March 18, for a limited engagement at the Varsity Cinema (55 Bloor Street West). Click here for showtimes.

Fitting that Paul is bookended by scenes set at Comic-Con, San Diego’s annual gathering of the nerds. The film itself works like a modern comic book convention: it’s too busy, and its initial delights eventually give way to a kind of slumped, over-stimulated exhaustion. And just like any major dork expo, Paul only really asks you to shamble along with a dopey smile, self-satisfied in your ability to pick up on all the references.
Paul casts co-writers Nick Frost and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as two English bosom buddies charting a course across American UFO-related landmarks in a rented Winnebago. En route to Roswell, they narrowly avoid a collision with an unmarked black sedan carrying Paul, the eponymous CGI’d ET voiced by Seth Rogen. After the initial excitement (and pants-pissing) subsides, the two agree to aid and abet Paul as he escapes a hardass man in black (Jason Bateman) and his considerably less-than-hardass lackeys (Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio, both excellent). Along the way, they pick up a frumpy creationist (Kristen Wiig), escape her nutty creationist dad (John Carroll Lynch) and string together reference after laboured reference to all the major, and less major, science fiction properties of the last sixty years.
Like Pegg and Frost’s Channel 4 sitcom, Spaced, Paul rollicks in its referential pop ephemera. Unlike Spaced, it’s hurting for the whip-panning direction of Edgar Wright. Mottola is too lax. He handles it like a Seth Rogen picture, not a Pegg/Frost picture, and instead of the giddy reverence Wright pays to the material he visually cites, Mottola lets his quotes hang there. Like someone at Comic-Con nodding approvingly in the direction of a faithfully reconstructed Cloud Strife costume, Paul expects its audiences to cheer at mere mentions of Agent Mulder, Predator, and, of course, E.T.. (Its best nod, to the campfire pot-smoking scene in Easy Rider, comes off so well precisely because it’s dispensed more delicately.)
The film isn’t lacking jokes (“dick,” “fart,” “fuck,” and the granddaddy of all funny curses, “cocksucker,” are all trotted out loyally), but its navel-gazing lip service to nerd culture never really services anything else. Like so many films more consumed with crafting a tight matrix of winks and allusions than, you know, a non-hackneyed story, Paul expends so much energy indexing great films (and Mac and Me) that it never really bothers aspiring to them. That said, if you snickered seeing the words “Mac and Me” just there, you’ll probably love it. ‘Cos oh man, remember Mac and Me?
Paul opens Friday, March 18, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

Adapted from Alan Glynn’s pseudo-sci-fi novel The Dark Fields, Limitless is a desperately “cerebral” piece of lifestyle porn. Bradley Cooper (the smug, good-looking, obnoxious one from The Hangover) stars as Eddie Morra, a scrappy New York novelist who’s well past his deadline. Desperate to stimulate the flow of his creative juices, Eddie begins taking an experimental pharmaceutical he scams off his ex-wife’s brother (Johnny Whitworth). The drug, NZT, promises amplified perception of the highest order, activating those eighty to ninety percent of neurons we’re told remain dormant.
NZT lives up to its miracle drug status, and Eddie finishes his novel in a flash, only to get bored and move into the high-stakes world of stocks, bonds, bulls, bears, and all that other big-money inside-trader stuff that the movie doesn’t really seem to understand. He also gets a haircut, a shave, and a new suit, which comes as a relief—watching Cooper swathe his sub-McConaughey good looks in patchy facial hair and frumpy sweaters in the film’s first act is just embarrassing. Eventually, his Wall Street wunderkind rep attracts the attention of a voracious trader (Robert DeNiro), just as the drug’s benefits begin wearing on him.
Limitless is Phillip K. Dick lite: a heady, vaguely psychotropic premise set up to service an hour and a half of sexy thriller tropes. The film gives over little time to its most interesting mystery, NZT’s mechanism. Apart from the first scene, in which the active ingredient seizes Eddie’s brain, we’re given no real sense of how it works or what it does, besides allowing you to become immediately polyglottal and able to innately understand the ebb and flow of global trade (courtesy of numbers and equations whizzing past you constantly).
Cooper’s as unlikeable as ever. In one snatch of dialogue, his character is referred to as a “big blur of handsome,” which might as well be the tagline on Cooper’s own CV. DeNiro does that contemporary DeNiro thing where he hacks it but still takes himself way too seriously to be funny. And apart from a nice turn by Andrew Howard as a brutish mobster, none of the other performances really stick. Burger has no interest in developing the underlying sci-fi threads, relishing instead in flashy, digitally buffed montages. In Burger’s delirious hands, it may be intermittently psychedelic, but Limitless is about four hits shy of being at all mind-blowing.
Limitless opens Friday, March 18, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.