“All the women who are independent,” declares Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) early on in Far from the Madding Crowd, “throw your hands up at me!” Okay, maybe she doesn’t quite say that, but halfway through Thomas Vinterberg’s handsome, unremarkable new take on the classic novel, one might be forgiven for wanting to hear Beyoncé blasting anachronistically on the soundtrack. For an adaptation of a story so rich in its theme of female determination, this well-mounted and serviceably acted film plays disappointingly by the period drama playbook. Though not without some charm, it’s more akin to an anonymous BBC production than the work of a once-exciting Dogme 95 alumnus.
Set against the pastoral landscape of late 19th-century England, Thomas Hardy’s epic of a headstrong heroine forging her way in a world dominated by men is certainly ripe for another interpretation. Having inherited her uncle’s farming estate, the fiercely independent Bathsheba is charged with managing an entire enterprise on her own, all while contending with a carousel of eager suitors after a piece of her. There’s her hunky, earthy shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts); the well-to-do neighboring landowner William Boldwood (Michael Sheen); and a dashing young sergeant, Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge), who may be hiding a secret life of his own (alas poor Juno Temple, squandered in another minor part). It’s a story less concerned with romance than expediency, of how relationships are fought for and shaped under the right circumstances rather than some mythical notion of love—and a peculiarly modern tale in that respect. “I’d hate to be one man’s property,” Bathsheba insists to Oak in an early scene, and the movie chronicles her bid to prove it.
Madding hasn’t seen a straightforward period adaptation since John Schlesinger’s widescreen 1967 marathon, a film shot by the inimitable Nicolas Roeg and starring a considerable ensemble of Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp’s jodhpurs. Whatever that version’s faults—running almost three hours with overtures, entr’actes, and folk song diversions, it flirts generously with tedium—it seems to have cast quite a shadow over Vinterberg’s film, which goes so far as to quote several shots verbatim. Coming in at just under two hours, the new take benefits from its relative brevity, distilling the novel’s chapters without losing its narrative sweep, but it curiously fails to stake out much personality of its own as cinema. Vinterberg and writer David Nicholls, a British TV veteran behind 2012’s rote Great Expectations, have pared back the material to resemble a soap opera—the kind of film where a character’s sudden reappearance from death seems to invite a tacky push-in and dramatic musical exclamation.
The film does have its moments. Despite their apparent reverence for Schlesinger and Roeg, Vinterberg and his longtime cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen occasionally stage some memorable images of their own, like Oak wandering in silhouette among his dead sheep that lie on the shore like beached whales, or a woodlands-set remix of Troy’s famous swordplay courtship of Bathsheba—considerably more erotically charged, if less dynamically edited, than the ’67 scene. And while neither Schoenaerts, Sheen, or Sturridge are anywhere close to respective matches for Bates, Finch, and Stamp, Carey Mulligan is a more-than-worthy successor to Julie Christie. Hers is a robust performance, resolute and cool with just the right measure of temper when required. Mulligan and Vinterberg work well together: she handles a tricky emotional spectrum with aplomb, and he isn’t afraid to go in tight to make sure his audience sees it.
Still, one might have hoped for something a little more buoyant from a director of Vinterberg’s pedigree. True, his previous film The Hunt gestured more toward the middle of the road aesthetically, but it retained a degree of moral ambiguity that Vinterberg appears to have put on hold here in the service of classic lit. Admittedly, Hardy has proved a difficult mark for filmmakers, and Vinterberg’s film is no better or worse than those before it: Schlesinger’s Madding only sporadically engages, Polanski couldn’t quite wrangle Tess, and recent reimaginings like Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna didn’t transcend their contemporary gimmick. That doesn’t make it any less dispiriting to watch the director of The Celebration plodding along in such middlebrow fashion, however. Consider, by way of a very trivial example, that in Schlesinger’s version the audience is treated to a square-on shot of Terrence Stamp’s naked ass as he wades out into the ocean; here, Vinterberg doesn’t even bother to have Sturridge remove his drawers in an identical scene. What would Lars von Trier think?
To state the obvious, imagine the potential riches Hardy’s novel might have yielded in the hands of a female director. A filmmaker like Andrea Arnold or Sofia Coppola—who’ve both demonstrated a thrilling ability to shake up period pieces—could have brought out a stronger contemporary resonance by playing looser with, and even against, the source material. Then again, maybe a dissatisfaction with Vinterberg’s film makes it a revealing artifact after all. As Bathsheba protests at one point, “It is difficult for a woman to express her feelings in a language chiefly made by men.”
