Far from the Madding Crowd.

The recent DVD issue of Thomas Vinterberg  adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd  reminds me that I did not review it when it first came out.   Here goes.

I think  this movie is superior in many ways to the 1967 John Schlesinger film, starring Julie Christie, Peter Finch, Terence Stamp and Alan Bates.   The Vinterberg film has only one failing, but it is major. 

I think Carrie Mulligan’s reading of Bathsheba is very good, less flirtatious than Julie Christie’s,  less impulsive and more emancipated, even though the early voice-over establishing her feminist credentials is soon abandoned.    Henry James complained of the novel that "we cannot say that we either understand or like Bathsheba. She is a young lady of the inconsequential, willful, mettlesome type," one who "remains alternately vague and coarse and seems always artificial."   I think that Carrie makes her much more than that.   She is never vague, coarse or inconsequential, even though she is willful.     This  seriousness makes Bathsheba’s  sending of the Valentine card  to Boldwood  even more  disastrous, as it is so out of character.   We can see why Boldwood takes it in earnest.    

Her relationship with Sergeant Troy is of course irrational.   She falls in love with him, and it is not Mulligan’s fault that this seems improbable.     Tom Sturridge is not Terrence Stamp.   He lacks the intelligence and charisma of Troy’s earlier incarnation, and he seems sullen rather than heartbroken.    I think this is the major failure.  The Schlesinger 1967 film lasted nearly three hours, and we had time then to see more of Troy and Fanny Robin (Juno Temple) and understand Troy’s bitterness when he believes she has jilted him.    He is of course punishing Bathsheba for (what he thought was) Fanny’s betrayal, but in the later film his profound feelings of bitterness are not well enough established.      So, although Sturridge is dashing  he does not have the depth to explain either Bathsheba’s infatuation with him, or his own discombobulation.     

Bathsheba’s  ongoing relationship with  Gabriel, however, properly reflects her growing maturity.     Thomas Vinterberg has worked with  Matthias Schoenaerts before, in the remarkable Rust and Bone.  I simply did not recognize him here as having played that previous role.    I thought he more than matched Alan Bates’s performance,  as strong and enduring as an oak, he brought a physical presence that Bates lacked.      Michael Sheen presents a more sympathetic Boldwood than Peter Finch, who played him as imperious and obsessed, whereas Sheen shows us his vulnerability and integrity.    The conversation between Oak and Boldwood is beautifully done.   It has been  said that in this film ‘the passions that drive Hardy’s characters remain more stated than truly felt’,  but at least the passions are Hardy’s, not Hollywood’s.

And this story is about more than a four-sided triangle.   Hardy was consistently intrigued by the capricious nature of fate and the consequences of the apparently inconsequential.   The lost scarf, the mistaken church, the impetuous Valentine are all crucial to the plot, and this theme is well presented.   But/and, in the end, destiny/love triumphs.   Hardy was, after all a true Romantic.

Vinterberg brought his usual cinematographer,  Charlotte Bruus Christensen, to England to shoot Far From, and her work is magnificent.   Christensen’s images are lustrous,  with misty mornings,  honey blessed sunny days,  unsentimental sunsets and the essential rolling landscapes, honouring Hardy’s love of the country.    I think the famous swordplay/foreplay scene is more effective here than in the Schlesinger version.   It may be rather sad that someone (the Producers?)  changed the location from Wessex to Dorset, no doubt trying not confuse Americans, who often need to be told that scenes are set in ‘Paris, France’, or even ‘London, England’).

So what do I make of it all?   I think it is thoughtfully Directed, beautifully shot, and with a good score.    It is well written by David Nicholls - even if the final script is too short to fill out the inner turmoil of Troy.   Well acted; even though Sturridge cannot make Troy’s attraction to Bathsheba really credible.   Schoenaerts  fills out Gabriel Oak and Sheen earns our sympathy as Boldwood.  

In Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby Carrie Mulligan was given an uphill task trying to make Daisy interesting.   Fitzgerald’s Daisy is essentially shallow.   Hardy’s Bathsheba, on the other hand, has a depth that was not plumbed in the 1967 version.   This is her film, and Carrie owns it.