Mary Rivers has a few small roles in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Film, “Jane Eyre” (2011). She is one of the very first characters we meet in this film and from start to finish she has this very warm comforting feeling to her and is very accepting and loving of Jane. Jane has lived a very painful life and is very rarely met with love and nurture. Mary’s character also really reminds me of Janes first friend in her childhood, Helen Burns, who has the same kind and caring personality as her. Every scene that Mary is in she has this childlike innocence to her because she has never had to deal with major trauma. She is always very interested in what Jane is doing and supports and encourages her. In one of the scenes Jane is drawing and Mary jumps at the opportunity to show her brother her work even though she didn’t have permission. She is here to support and give a comfort to our main character which would then, bring comfort to the viewers. She is the sister of Jane’s love interest so her having this compassionate personality would also push us to love and trust her brother. In the section, “Referential acting and the ensemble cast”, written by Ernest Mathijis in “The Small Parts, Small Players Dossier”. He talks about the key tools in acting and goes into polysemous expression. “Holding the same facial or bodily posture to reveal different emotions that are only recognizable when placed in contrast with other images” (Mathijis, 2011). I think Mary’s polysemous expression are spot on to what her character is meant to be doing for our main character. She is comforting, kind and loving and you can see this in the way her face look and the posture in her back and the way she walks. You can tell she means only good and that she is a genuinely caring person. Instead of the many antagonists we see throughout this moving where their posture and faces say the very opposite. While Mary was not a main character her love and joy helped our main character heal and push past which in my opinion is just as important.
Ernest Mathijs, Referential acting and the ensemble cast, Screen, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2011, Pages 89–96, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjq063
Fukunaga, Cary Joji, director. Jane Eyre. Universal Pictures, 2011.
Provide Feedback