Far from the Madding Crowd

fft2It may be nearly 50 years since John Schlesinger’s monumental adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, but has the big screen really been waiting for another?

The heroine, would-be farmer Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), is an independent woman who’s not to be tamed. We know that, because it’s what she tells Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenarts), the local shepherd who wastes no time in offering himself as her first suitor. Thomas Vinterberg’s version clocks in at around 45 minutes shorter than Schlesinger’s, but still needs to encompass Hardy’s one-damn-thing-after-another plot – so the audience is rarely left to work things out for themselves, from the opening caption telling us that Wessex is ‘200 Miles from London’, perhaps not to disappoint any punters who’ve been expecting the cast of OLIVER! to come cartwheeling across the screen.

There are plenty of period-film geese, in the foreground of the handsomely shot Dorset locations; and an equally large number of picturesque yokels quacking in the background as the action unfolds. Having catastrophically lost his sheep, and been rebuffed by Bathsheba, Oak finds himself working for her after she inherits her uncle’s run-down farm. Her neighbour, the lonely William Boldwood (Michael Sheen) is soon plighting his own troth to Bathsheba, spurred on by a cruelly mischievous valentine she sends him -before dashing his hopes.

Despite her assertion that she is not to be tamed, Bathsheba finds herself being exactly that, with the appearance of the dashing Sergeant Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge), twirling his moustache and his rapier in a seduction sequence made famous by Terence Stamp in the earlier film. Troy has turned his attentions Bathsheba-wards after apparently being jilted at the altar by Fanny Robin, his true love (and soon to be mother of his child) – though Fanny has gone to the wrong church, in another typically Hardy touch. Bathsheba marries Troy against Oak’s sage advice, and after everything goes sour and Troy disappears, she seems ready to succumb to a life of security beneath Boldwood’s lavishly-decorated Christmas tree, festooned with gifts bearing the name ‘Bathsheba Boldwood’. But who’s this mysterious figure, emerging from the darkness in the drive?

The hesitant Boldwood and monosyllabic Oak have unfortunate resonances of Ralph and Ted in The Fast Show…

The story-telling in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD should be foolproof, with three well-defined male characters literally serving an irresistibly impetuous heroine who struggles to assert herself against the odds. In the 1967 version it was just as important that Julie Christie embodied the freewheeling spirit of her age – she had just won an Oscar as the equally ambitious Diana in DARLING, also written by Frederic Raphael. Her Bathsheba was given to throwing handfuls of corn into the air in slow-motion, in the manner of a Timotei commercial. Backing her up were the doughty Alan Bates as Oak and Peter Finch as the bewildered Boldwood, safe pairs of hands both, with fellow 1960s icon Terence Stamp, whose unpredictable behaviour (and accent) added a dangerous edge.

But here the casting skews the balance, in particular the one-dimensional men: fretting in the farmyard over Bathsheba’s future, the hesitant Boldwood and monosyllabic Oak have unfortunate resonances of Ralph and Ted in The Fast Show. ‘I’m a middle-aged man’, says Boldwood as he presents his case once more to Bathsheba, in another example of David Nicholls’ on-the-nose dialogue (I fully expect a future version of DRACULA to include the Count explaining himself to a victim with ‘Look, I’m 450 years old’).

In both THE HUNT and his earlier work FESTEN, Thomas Vinterberg showed his skill at handling a group dynamic and creating a multi-layered narrative. Here, the group just doesn’t gel, despite a central performance from Carey Mulligan which is both strong and subtle given the script’s limitations: Hardy- (if not Hornby-) lite.

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