THERE are few tasks as fraught with peril as adapting a bona fide classic for the big screen. Broadly speaking, there are two ways a director can go about doing it; either use the text as a starting point to weave your own yarn and create a mood all your own as did Baz Luhrmann with his 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet, or hew as faithfully to the original as possible like Franco Zefirelli did in 1968 for his take on the same Shakespearean play. Both approaches will be sure to leave at least a segment of the potential audience alienated. Pursue the former vision and purists will knock the director for soiling and defiling a sacred work; the latter will lead to accusations of unoriginality.

Director Cary Joji Fukunaga tries to have it both ways and largely succeeds in the umpteenth adaptation of Jane Eyre, released earlier this year. The basics of the plot will be familiar to anyone (or should that be everyone?) who has read Charlotte Brontë’s novel published in 1847. The eponymous heroine, played in the movie by Mia Wasikowska, is devoid of both wealth and conventional good looks but has personality in spades.

As with the novel, the film concentrates on Jane’s relationship with Edward Rochester, her employer and the only person she can truly confide in. The Jane of the film is similar to the one in the novel who captured the hearts and minds of readers for over two centuries: she is brave and honest without being overbearingly self-righteous about either of these qualities.

Those who hoped for a retread of Brontë would have reason to be nervous given the decision to cast Wasikowska in the lead role. Last year she played Alice in Tim Burton’s woeful reexamination of the Lewis Carroll novel. This time around, Wasikowska handles the role with all the delicacy of a dedicated fan. Significantly, she is also the first Jane Eyre not to have conventional movie-star looks. Rather, she adopts the blank face and hard stare that is characteristic of the heroine and refuses to indulge in any of the mourning and self-pity of previous cinematic Jane Eyres.

For the most part, the rest of the cast handles their roles with equal aplomb, and will be eerily familiar to Jane Eyre devotees, be it Jamie Bell as the saintly clergyman, Sally Hawkins as Jane’s loathsome aunt or Dame Judi Dench as the housekeeper Mrs Fairfax. Such faithfulness, however, does not always pay off. Brontë’s depiction of Edward Rochester was embodied by Orson Welles in the 1944 movie version and as a result, Michael Fassbender as Edward in this year’s adaptation does not work. The ghost of Welles’ towering performance hovers over every frame that Fassbender is in.

Where Fukunaga diverges from the original is in the unfolding of the narrative. The movie traces Jane’s life through flashbacks, beginning with her being nursed back to health by St John Rivers and his sisters. This opening scene of the movie actually occurred towards the end of the second act in the novel. But that is a minor departure. Quickly and efficiently, the audience is then shown how Jane survived a torturous existence with her aunt and cousins and an even more vile experience at boarding school.

Although the plot and language of the novel are not adhered to with much fidelity, the themes remain constant. Jane’s desire for liberation, her need to be truly free, is still the centrepiece of this reworked version.

Fassbender may be too good-looking for the role of Rochester but the first time he encounters Jane helps vividly recall the book in a way that movie adaptations of Victorian-era novels rarely do. Instead of a prettified English country scene, we get a damp, ferocious wood where Jane meets a brooding, terrifying Rochester. Their very first meeting is charged with erotic energy but, as with the book, it is Jane who is more steadfast than the eccentric Rochester.

Without spoiling it much for those few who may not have read the book, the secret person Rochester keeps in his attic is made real in as vivid, terrifying and, dare I say, insane a manner as was done by Brontë. That unknown person is as much a ghostly apparition in the film as in the book with her incomprehensible babbling and stolen glances at Jane when she is asleep.

For some fans, the 2011 Jane Eyre will be an unsolvable conundrum. More than every other adaptation, it strives to stay true to its source material. But that doesn’t make it the best Jane Eyre movie yet. That distinction still belongs to the transcendent 1944 iteration.

Given that there are already nearly 30 movie and television versions of the novel in circulation, perhaps it would have been better to give a fresh sheen to this evergreen gem of a novel.