Thomas Hardy, Light and Sumptuous
DIRECTOR THOMAS VINTERBERG proves a “Capability” Brown of film in this remake of Thomas Hardy’s classic late Victorian novel Far from the Madding Crowd. He has turned the untamed, unfeeling natural world of Hardy’s Wessex into a landscape garden. All of nature is beautiful to the eye; all the peasants are rosy-cheeked and good natured; all the barnyards are free of muck and clutter. The world is almost unbearably pretty.
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Yes, it can be frustratingly difficult, perhaps impossible to capture the “great” of great novels on film. As always, Hardy’s is a powerful story. An independent and quite self-confident young woman, heiress to her uncle’s farm estate, finds herself with three very different suitors. Rejecting Gabriel Oak, the steady shepherd with both heart and values, and rejecting wealthy Farmer Boldwood the man of station and security, Bathsheba Everdene picks and impulsively marries the bad-boy smarmy git, Sergeant Troy. Rather than having to spend her life paying for her foolish choice, however, Bathsheba is rescued by fortune; Farmer Boldwood shoots and kills her profligate husband, thereby ridding her of both, and, predictably, leaving her free to end up with the sturdy English Oak.
It is almost impossible not to like this lavish, lush film. After all, this is a love story, where the good guy wins in the end. The cinematography is breath-taking (and Dorset is indeed among the most beautiful of the shires), with sweeping, evocative and almost ethereal landscape shots. In lingering close-ups with soft focus each of the principals in this love quartet telegraphs their emotions and their ambiguities unequivocally to the audience, if not to each other.
For those that have read Far from the Madding Crowd and other of the novelist’s Wessex tales, this is Thomas Hardy light—the condensed or Classics Illustrated version. Though the story, the characters and the choices they make are familiar, it doesn’t feel like Thomas Hardy’s world at all. Far from the bright, scrubbed countryside and faces, in Hardy’s Wessex nature and life are grubby, hard and far from benevolent.
Carey Mulligan as Bathesheba, Michael Sheen as Farmer Boldwood and Matthias Schoenaerts as Oak each turn in fine performances, but we’re often left wondering about their motivations. In 1967’s movie, Julie Christie, Peter Finch and Alan Bates are grittier in the same roles, but they are also better developed as characters. With a 40-minutes longer screen run, there is just more time to unpack their complexity.
Those who will most love this movie are those who don’t have comparisons to make to Hardy’s novel or to the 1967 film version. Admittedly, thinking of Far from the Madding Crowd as a chick flick seems a stretch. Divorced from these other frames of reference, however, that’s just what this film is. As such, this Far from the Madding Crowd is great. See it for the sheer visual beauty of its scenes and the lush southern English landscape and its stylized depiction of agrarian life in the Victorian mid-19th century. Then, do read the novel.
Far from the Madding Crowd, starring Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts and Michael Sheen, Directed by Thomas Vinterberg. Run time: 119 minutes
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