It could just be that we need to take a break from period drama; that a degree of post-Downton petticoat fatigue has set in. So far, 2015’s first quarter has given us a listless Suite Française and the piffling A Little Chaos. Now we have a new version of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, arriving mere weeks after that glowing restored print of John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation. What on God’s green Earth might this upstart retelling, overseen by Dogme graduate Thomas Vinterberg, have to offer us?
For one, the new film provides another demonstration of the Carey Mulligan effect: how this most watchable of young actresses is capable of giving even the middling material some elevation. Mulligan works diligently around the determinism of a David (One Day) Nicholls script that insists on emboldening her Bathsheba at every turn; we are, one senses, only a development meeting or two away from watching our heroine flick through Tinder profiles to the accompaniment of “Independent Women” by Destiny’s Child.
Nicholls’ take surrounds its Bathsheba with suitors who, though generally sincere in their affections, view her as an extension of their own property; men who would possess her as they do an estate (Michael Sheen’s quietly, skilfully heartbreaking Boldwood) or a handful of sheep (Matthias Schoenaerts, more engaged than he was in A Little Chaos, as the sturdy farmer Oak). The limitations of this approach soon become apparent.
Experience allows us to see why Bathsheba would turn these two down to then fall for the dashing, carefree blade Sergeant Troy – yet Tom Sturridge, in the movie, plays him as such a callow, preening prat that it begins to undermine all Mulligan’s intelligent, sensitive work: given her options, and her much-cherished autonomy, why would she lose her heart to this jerk, who resembles Terence Stamp far less than he does Tim McInnerny’s Captain Darling in Blackadder?
Of course, you could always tune out and lose yourself in the scenery, this version being rich in BBC Films finery: you can only snigger as Bathsheba remarks, of the farm she’s inherited, “it’s a little ragged now”, and the camera cranes round to reveal a thoroughly picturesque pile of bricks the Camerons might well take as a second or third home.
Vinterberg’s come a long way, both geographically and budgetarily, since his Dogme heyday, when a film like Festen intended to rattle those bourgeois audiences he’s now so obviously courting. He’s gained an eye for landscape to match the one he already had for social ritual, but the film still feels a rather impersonal assignment, lacking even the minor provocations of 2012’s The Hunt: with the mud and grime kept to a minimum, the whole unfolds in some eternal springtime, and you do start to wonder whether handsomeness is all it really has going for it.
The attempt to shine roseate light into every corner of Hardyworld leaves matters looking more than a little banal: though some of Nicholls’ annotations (a Bathsheba-Boldwood duet on folk song “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”, for instance) are effective, he also appends a superfluous church scene in which Bathsheba explains her decision-making process to her young companion (Tamara Drewe’s Jessica Barden), and makes fiddly attempts to foreshadow or plead away Boldwood’s final action, which inevitably comes to be far less shockingly felt than it has been elsewhere.
More calculated than tempestuous, this adaptation operates on a brisk, no-nonsense commercial logic: it’s unlikely anyone will emerge too disappointed, not least as the finale alights upon a symmetry that is not altogether unpleasing. What’s missing is exactly that nonsense Hardy was writing about, and which Schlesinger revelled in for another forty minutes: the mysteries of attraction and repulsion, the changing of the seasons, those elements of our existence that cannot be fully rationalised or explained. Without them, this narrative begins to look perilously like a gorgeously illuminated procession of Cliff’s Notes.
(MovieMail, April 2015)
Far From The Madding Crowd screens on BBC One at 12.05am tomorrow.
