Far ’nuff

By Noel Vera

DVD Review
Far from the Madding Crowd
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg

THOMAS VINTERBERG’S adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s first real success is, well, middling fair. The producers must have thought: “Well, if we are going to have a smart stylish update of a staid overfamiliar English novel we need a Dogme 95 filmmaker to shake things up literally (Vinterberg is fond of the handheld shot) and figuratively (Vinterberg’s The Celebration dealt with incest while The Hunt involved a man accused of child abuse).” Vinterberg is not a bad choice — he has got the grave, gravid approach to storytelling that Hardy seems to demand, with the kind of unflinching eye willing to capture the novel’s more disturbing nuances.

More, he has assembled a nice little cast of young intelligent actors to flesh out the story — Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene, Matthias Schoenaerts as Gabriel Oak, Tom Sturridge as Cavalry Sergeant Frank Troy, and the always interesting Michael Sheen as the psychologically knotted William Boldwood. Mulligan, Schoenaerts, and Sturridge look about the right age for their characters; at any rate they look right for the effect Vinterberg was apparently aiming for: when Bathsheba inherits a farm from her uncle and immediately fires the farm’s manager you worry for her (she looks barely old enough to go to the prom, much less manage a farm); when Troy casts heavy-lidded looks at Bathsheba you guess (correctly) that the ploy has repeatedly worked with other girls — basically a party trick he’s performed again and again, the execution grown smooth with practice.

Hard not to compare this to John Schlesinger’s 1967 version, with Julie Christie as Bathsheba, Alan Bates as Gabriel, Terence Stamp as Frank Troy. Schlesinger’s arguably doesn’t make much sense: the characters offer and reject, couple and separate with barely a comprehensible motive between them, particularly Bathsheba — when she turns the perfectly masculine Alan Bates down it’s as if she knew the more mysterious Terence Stamp is scheduled to pop up somewhere down the road. Vinterberg at least inserts a point of view, suggests however fleetingly why Gabriel finds Bathsheba so attractive (she’s vivid), why she rejects him (he’s not that special), why the rejection is a deadly embarrassment (women just don’t treat men that way). Later it’s clear why Oak mistrusts Boldwood: he’s not just a romantic rival but a representative of the social class that looked down on him all his life, the same class whose ranks he had hoped to join one time.

Despite which John Schlesinger’s 1967 version already is a smart stylish update of Hardy’s novel — itself familiar, but hardly what I’d call staid. And while Vinterberg works harder at rendering psychological nuance, Schlesinger seems more successful at capturing the poetry — the sense you get when reading Hardy that vast forces surround his characters as they cling, short-lived and feeble, to their tiny plot of unplowed soil.

Take for example the tryst between Bathsheba and Frank Troy — in Vinterberg’s the meeting happens in an enchanted forest, their intimacy enhanced by the crowding, enclosing trees; in Schlesinger’s they’re ants crawling along the ridges of gigantic hills, undulating masses of rock and soil that don’t seem to care if the lovers kiss or talk or are skewered. When Stamp charges at Christie with saber aimed half an inch to the side of her ear, the camera follows with reckless abandon; Stamp’s Troy seems to enjoy more than enough necessary room for his ebullient braggadocio, the hills around him having the simultaneous effect of both mocking his chivalry and rendering it larger than life.

The best adapters of Hardy seem to understand this: that nature is not some gorgeous woman to be rouged and lipsticked and kissed but a force of nature to be acknowledged, to be feared. The acknowledgement happens early in Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1996), the black-and-white opening shot where Jude and his father toil in an endless muddy field shot and lit to look like the far side of the moon; it happens late in Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) when they arrive, hunted by police, at Stonehenge. Tess (Nastassja Kinski) for all the turmoil and suffering in her life pauses to touch the pitiless stones. She can sense the immeasurable reaches of time they represent, the story so much stonier and more ancient than her own.

Vinterberg with his young-looking cast and not inconsiderable filmmaking skill has created a fine and lively love story, which is all to the good of course. It’s not quite Hardy, though — his poetry here is much more prosaic, its evocative powers greatly diminished. You might compare the two versions the way you’d compare their lead actors: one a lovely waif, delicate and heartrending in her vulnerability yet full of intelligence and spirited fire; the other a full-grown woman. You pick the Bathsheba you prefer.