"The two most important things that can happen to you in a mainstream movie are being killed and having an orgasm."

Ebert gets down to business.

Drive

Other people in the theater did not like Drive as much as I did.  I think I understand why--it's very slow and when it is not slow it is very brutal. If you went there to see Ryan Gosling looking pretty, and driving fast, you could reasonably feel disappointed. If your objection to the movie is that it lacks a moral center though, I think you have missed the point. I think the joke is on you, for thinking you could get your morals from the movies in the first place. Drive is an examination not just of violence, but of violence in the movies. It is a movie about movies.

Drive is all dressed up as an eighties movie. The music, the scribbly pink text of the credits, the costumes (especially Christina Hendricks in one particularly rad acid-washed tight gray hoodie), the way the romantic relationship develops mostly in eye contact and awkward silences--every scene that is not drenched in blood feels like it would be right at home in Some Kind of Wonderful or Pretty in Pink.

The main character, who does not have a name, is a stunt driver. When he puts on a mask and gets in a police car he will drive for the scene, then we see the car crash and flip over, it is impossible not to think about the other stunt driver, the guy who is really actually driving that car in that scene. I am not saying it is staggeringly original, but it is layered--there is Ryan Gosling, then there is the character he is playing ("driver"), who is wearing the face of another actor, but inside that costume is actually another actor, a real-life stunt driver. Albert Brooks (scary Albert Brooks!) plays a film producer/investor/criminal--he talks about the european action movies he used to produce—he thought they were shitty, in case you were wondering. In case you were wondering whether the movies are terrible and corrupt? Oh yes, they are.

There is a scene in an elevator. A bad guy, and Carey Mulligan, and Gosling is there to keep her safe, and she doesn't really know. Like the rest of the movie, this scene is mostly silent. Then in slow motion, Gosling moves the girl into the corner, in slow motion he kisses her, and the lights of the elevator obligingly dim to match the action of the scene. This is the sort of thing that happens in movies. The lights come back and the kiss ends, and Gosling beats the bad guy to death with his hands and feet, literally crushing his skull under his heel. The violence in this moment is astonishing, and as Carey Mulligan backs slowly out of the elevator, she seems to hold a lot of different emotions in balance on her face: shock, fear, disappointment, confusion, bewilderment. And maybe I'm overreaching here, but I think the reaction is sadness and regret, and also betrayal: he is thinking, What did you expect?

That's what the movie was saying, to those ladies behind me who groaned when Albert Brooks deocculated a guy with a fork, and giggled when Ron Perlman said "fuck" for the five-hundredth time. You came to the movies--you aren't here for a nonviolent resolution, or for complicated depthy characters. You came here for some cowboy violence and some fast driving. Careful what you wish for.

Jane Eyre

The first time I read Jane Eyre, I was just the right age to swoon over the romance of the whole thing. I liked Jane because she was just like me—she too had felt isolated! She had suffered injustice—adults had misunderstood and judged her. Like me, she read books. She was chock full of faith and morality, but she saw that there is hypocrisy in religion. We had everything in common. When Jane started crushing on the boss, I was right there with her.

Jane has intellectual reasons to like Rochester; unlike everyone else she has ever met, he treats her with a certain kind of respect, as a conversational sparring partner. He recognizes her intelligence. But she also likes him because he is a perfect bad boy. He is mean and unforgiving of people in general. He treats her differently, and it is very pleasant to be friends with a bully—to be one of the few people liked by a mean snob.

Rochester has a mysterious dark side. And he likes Jane not in spite of her nerdiness, but because of it. He likes her because she is bookish and smart and above all good. He thinks she can save him, and he warns her not to. Who could resist?

I read Jane Eyre again in college, and I hated it in the way you only hate things you are very interested in. That summer, I told Cindy I was so angry about the story, I wanted to rewrite it from the perspective of Bertha, the crazy wife in the attic. She said, “Um, have you heard of The Wide Sargasso Sea?” I had wanted the book before I knew it existed, which shows how necessary the book is; it is impossible to read Jane Eyre now without wanting to know more about the mad first wife.

To me in college, it seemed obvious that Rochester was a run-of-the-mill abusive spouse, first to Bertha and then to Jane. I thought Jane's only desire was to conform to a very conventional idea of heterosexual love. I had no time for Jane's “master” this and “sir” that. In this reading, she rejected St. John not because he was too pragmatic or too conventional, but because he was not brutal enough, and love—in all heterosexual relationships, in my world view, in 1996—is synonymous with masculine cruelty. I guess I thought Jane chose Rochester as the best of limited bad options. Now I see that I was wrong about that.

The thing is, Jane did not return to Rochester until she had better options on every front. She was financially independent. More important than the money, she had found in the Rivers siblings the one thing she had never had outside of Thornfield—a family of intelligent, good people who liked and respected her. Returning to Rochester was not a compromise—I'll take a little bullying in exchange for intellectual stimulation. No, she went back to him because he dominated her, not in spite of it. She chose to be mastered, freely and on her own terms. That's why Jane is a radical and difficult kind of feminist hero. There is this scene in Jane Eyre, when Rochester confesses that he loves Jane, and asks her to marry him. He insists that she call him by his Christian name, and she does, just once. She immediately reverts to “master” and “sir,” because she likes it that way.

None of this is about the latest Jane Eyre movie, or any of the other Jane Eyre movies. I have seen a lot of film versions of the story, and they never really get it right. Almost always they soften the relationship between Jane and Rochester. He is more likeable and younger than he should be, and Jane is older. Every film version I have seen simplifies (or completely erases—which makes for some very strange and confusing voiceover from Joan Fontaine in that version) the story of the Rivers family. I think the best Jane and Rochester are Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt, because she is odd-looking and he is over twenty years older than she is. But I think that is the worst movie, because it removes all the coincidences and the supernatural.

I do not know if it is possible to make a great movie version of this story, in part because it is long, and in part because it is subjective—for instance, Jane and Rochester both talk a lot about how unattractive they both are, and I like leaving the reliability of their judgment somewhat up to the imagination. I would like a movie version of Jane Eyre that is appropriately dark. It does not need to be six hours long, but it should be long enough to dedicate the necessary time to the story of the Rivers family, which is long and slow and, yes, ultimately, a little absurd. It should be totally sincere when it turns out that Jane and the Rivers siblings are long-lost cousins, and it should be equally sincere when Jane hears Rochester's voice from miles away, by magic. And in my version Jane loves Rochester in the end less because his transformation makes him humble than because it makes him into a sideshow freak.