Gabriel Oak is a young shepherd. With the savings of a frugal life, and a loan, he has leased and stocked a sheep farm. He falls in love with a newcomer six years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her aunt, Mrs. Hurst. Over time, Bathsheba and Gabriel grow to like each other well enough, and Bathsheba even saves his life once. However, when he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values her independence too much, and him too little. Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, Gabriel offers blunt protestations that only foster her haughtiness. After a few days, she moves to Weatherbury, a village some miles off.
When next they meet, their circumstances have changed drastically. An inexperienced new sheepdog drives Gabriel’s flock over a cliff, ruining him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all his debts but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a hiring fair in the town of Casterbridge.
When he finds none, he heads to another such fair in Shottsford, a town about ten miles from Weatherbury. On the way, he happens upon a dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out. When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba. She has recently inherited her uncle’s estate and is now wealthy. Though somewhat uncomfortable, she employs him.
Far from the Madding Crowd is a British romantic drama film directed by Thomas Vinterberg and starring Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge, and Juno Temple. It is an adaptation of the 1874 novel of the same name by Thomas Hardy, the fourth time this novel became a film.
Film Review for Far From the Madding Crowd
When news got out that Thomas Vinterberg was working on an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd, the pairing of author and director seemed too good to be true.
Vinterberg is the vinegary Dane who, in films like Festen and The Hunt, captured the chill of life so acutely that it made your heart twinge – and the story of a headstrong young woman buffeted by three rival suitors in south-west Victorian England seemed like the kind of jape he and Lars von Trier, his some-time collaborator, might have cooked up during a casual morning stroll across a blasted heath.
But in fact, Vinterberg has come back with something far more conventional: the film is less of a soul-gnawing, Nordically inflected tragedy than a superior Sunday-evening costume drama, or a mini-break in cinema form.
It’s no accident that the opening caption locates the action in “Dorset, England,” rather than Hardy’s own lightly fictionalised county of Wessex. As soon as you leave the cinema, you want to pack a suitcase.
Vinterberg and his director of photography, Charlotte Bruus Christensen, draw out the setting’s raw-boned beauty – even in the brutal early sequence in which the shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) watches his entire flock gallop, lemming-like, over the prow of a chalky cliff. As Gabriel surveys their bodies on the beach below, his life’s work lost with a shrug of nature’s shoulders, the rising sun makes the air as bright and sweet as banana milk.
The main snag in adapting Far from the Madding Crowd is that it has already been done three times, and once perfectly, by John Schlesinger in 1967 (read our review here). Schlesinger’s film, which starred Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, revelled in the details of rural life – its songs, rhythms and rituals – and sunk you up to the elbows in the community it depicted. But in Vinterberg’s version, the characters are lonelier, more isolated: like prospectors in a western, they’re specks on a hostile landscape.
When we first see Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), she’s standing by her horse in a darkened stable, preparing for the ride of her life. She’s inherited a large farm from her uncle and must relocate there at once, much to the disappointment of Gabriel, who had hoped to make her the mistress of his own, far humbler, estate.
Mulligan is on typically excellent form here. Her Bathsheba is every bit as much a Hardy heroine for our times as Christie’s was for the late Sixties, more reflective and less flighty than the earlier version, but also earnest to a fault.
Unfortunately, her male co-stars can’t quite match her pace, although that mostly comes down to the script, which does away with a handful of vital, character-shaping scenes in order to cram the plot into a commercially friendly two-hour running time (Schlesinger’s version was 50 minutes longer).
The scriptwriter is David Nicholls, who coped better fitting Tess of the D’Urbervilles into four hour-long episodes for the BBC in 2008. The main casualties are Juno Temple’s Fanny Robin, a character reduced to her barest bones, and Tom Sturridge’s Frank Troy, the roguish sergeant immortalised by Terence Stamp in the 1967 film who steals Bathsheba’s heart against her better judgment.
Carey Mulligan in ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’
Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd
Exasperatingly, Troy’s most charming and scurrilous scenes have all fallen by the wayside, which makes Bathsheba’s dealings with him ring less psychologically true. It also leaves the Sturridge version of the role seeming like less of a Stamp than a tip-toe.
But the young actor makes the best of the neutered material, and the scene in which Troy seduces Bathsheba in the forest with a display of swordsmanship actually improves on Stamp’s version. It’s a shiveringly eerie sequence that calls to mind the hyper-real sword fights in bamboo groves in martial-arts films like A Touch of Zen and House of Flying Daggers. Time seems to stand still, and the undergrowth throbs with greenness.
Elsewhere, though, the erotics are a bit more conventional: a scene in a barn in which Gabriel helps Bathsheba sharpen a knife on a whetstone might as well have been modelled on the pottery montage from Ghost.
Schoenaerts makes a fine softly spoken heartthrob, but his chemistry with Mulligan is all but overshadowed by the double-act he strikes up with Michael Sheen, who plays William Boldwood, the eldest of Bathsheba’s three suitors. There’s a kind of sweetly pained, Ted and Ralph quality to the twosome’s awkward discussions about their – ugh – feelings; Boldwood agonisingly skirting the point while Gabriel stares at his shoes. Like them, the film mostly behaves itself. It’s a wholly respectable adaptation, though perhaps a flash or two more of wildness wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Directed by: Thomas Vinterberg
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Tom Sturridge, Matthias Schoenaerts, Juno Temple, Jessica Barden, Jamie Lee-Hill, Eloise Oliver
Screenplay by: David Nicholls
Production Design by: Kave Quinn
Cinematography by: Charlotte Bruus Christensen
Film Editing by: Claire Simpson
Costume Design by: Janet Patterson
Set Decoration by: Niamh Coulter
Music by: Craig Armstrong
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexuality and violence.
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Release Date: May 1, 2015
Visits: 63
