Movie review: Far From the Madding Crowd - far from flawless

Far From the Madding Crowd is visually beautiful but suffers from a hasty plot line

Director Thomas Vinterberg’s Far From the Madding Crowd is an engaging and entertaining film but lacks the romance, sweep and grandeur required to successfully adapt Thomas Hardy’s classic pastoral novel. The film will disappoint fans of Hardy looking for drama, love, angst, yearning and passion. Concise and fast-paced, the film fails to offer the necessary deep exploration of Hardy’s willful and independent heroine, Bathsheba Everdene.

The root of the problem with Far From the Madding Crowd is its length. At 119 minutes, it is much shorter than John Schlesinger’s 160-minute long 1967 adaptation of the same novel, and omits a lot that was essential to the story. In order to keep the length short, the story has been trimmed to the bone, giving it the feel of contemporary, light-hearted romance, which is more appropriate for television rather than the large screen. Hardy’s interest in the unpredictability of fate, and in the effects of coincidence, accident and chance, are reduced to flimsy fatalism in a decidedly hurried and superficial treatment of the classic novel.

Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) is a spirited and willful young woman who inherits a large farm from her uncle. The young lady is determined to run the farm like a man — if not better — and while addressing her staff, proudly announces, “I shall astonish you all.” Busy realising her dream of running the farm successfully, Everdene attracts three suitors at the farm who leave her confused, amused and infatuated. The first among the suitors is the loyal and trustworthy shepherd, Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), whose proposal of marriage Everdene dismisses without much consideration. The second is William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), a middle-aged and rich landowner, who takes an obsessive liking to Everdene, but can neither win her heart nor get a clean break from her. The third is the strikingly handsome and rakish army officer, Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), who has a former lover and a fondness for gambling. Everdene knows that Troy is not the right person for her but she is unable to manage her feelings for the sergeant. Each man is attracted to the very independence that he wants to quell by marrying the heroine. And each one is wrong for her.

Everdene believes that she is too good for each one of the three men she holds in thrall. She is unwilling to accept proposals of marriage and unable to cut the men out of her life. A woman with money, and some talent in running a farm, she questions her need to marry at all. Yet, she remains hopelessly dependent and emotionally involved with the three men in her life. It is a character that is difficult to like and even more difficult to understand.

When the novel was first published in 1874, the heroine received very harsh treatment from critics. Reviews in The Observer, The Westminster Review and Nation were particularly scathing in their criticism of the character. Posterity has, of course, proved all the negative reviews wrong. The allure of the headstrong heroine has lasted for over a century but liking Hardy’s determined heroine is not easy. It requires a careful study of character, motivation and circumstance. Vinterberg’s film — the fifth adaptation of Hardy’s novel — allows no time for such study as it moves hastily from one plot point to the next. It reduces important characters in the novel, such as Fanny Robbin (Juno Temple) and Liddy (Jessica Barden), to cameo status and abbreviates crucial relationships, such as those between Robbin and Troy, Liddy and Everdene and Boldwood and Troy, to a few woefully underwritten scenes. This is a shame because its impeccable performances and superior production value could have made the film a true classic.



Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, June 14^th, 2015.