Jane Eyre is an intelligent, judicious, and sober cinematic adaptation of an overripe, overrich, hysterical masterpiece. The movie is an honorable and respectable effort undone by its good taste and emotional reticence.

Charlotte Bront’s novel is a singular literary performance, utterly believable on its own terms and utterly incredible as a portrait of real life. This is a book that begins with a tortured child left to nightmares in a blood-colored room and ends with a blinded and scarred middle-aged man living in the ruins of his once-great house who finds happiness and solace in a woman 25 years his junior. Bront’s Jane Eyre is magical and more than a little nuts, and if ever a movie version of a book could use all the bells, whistles, and gewgaws of vulgar big-budget filmmaking — swooping cameras, crashing thunderstorms, eye-popping sets, maybe a special effect here or there — Jane Eyre could.